The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad

3EYOND BAGHDA
with [HE LEICESTERSHIRI

EJ. THOMPSON M.C.

THE LEICESTERSHIRES BEYOND
BAGHDAD

The Leicestershires

Beyond Baghdad

BY
EDWARD J. THOMPSON, M.C.

AUTHOR OF
‘MESOPOTAMIAN VERSES,’ ‘ENNERDALE BRIDGE,”
‘ WALTHAM THICKETS,’ ETC.

LONDON

THE EPWORTH PRESS
J. ALFRED SHARP

To my brother, Frank D. THompson, Second-Lieutenant
Civil Service Rifles, attached King’s Royal Rifles; killed in
action, near Ypres, Jan. 13, 1917.

Our soldier youth thrice-loved, whose laughing face
In battle’s front can danger meet with eyes
No fear could e’er surprise ;
Nor stain of self in their gay love leave trace,
His nature like his name,
Frank, and his eager spirit pure as flame.
Waltham Thickets.

PREFACE

THE Mesopotamian War was a side-show, so dis-
tant from Europe that even the tragedy of Kut and
the slaughter which failed to save our troops and
prestige were felt chiefly in retrospect, when the
majority oi the men who suffered so vainly had gone
into the silence of death or of captivity. When
Maude’s offensive carried our arms again into Kut,
and beyond, to Baghdad, interest revived ; but of the
hard fighting which followed, which made Baghdad
secure, nothing has been made known, or next to
nothing. The men in Mesopotamia did not feel
that this was unnatural. We felt, none more so,
that it was the European War which mattered ;
indeed, our lot often seemed the harder by reason
of its little apparent importance. Yet, after all,
Baghdad was the first substantial victory which
no subsequent reverse swept away; and it came
when the need of victory, for very prestige’s sake,
was very great.

Mr. Candler has written, bitterly enough, of the
way the Censorship impeded him in his work as
official ‘ Eye-witness.’ His was a thankless task ;
as he well knows, few of us, though we were all his
friends, have not groused at his reports of our
operations. No unit groused more on this head

7

8 PREFACE

than my own division. We usually had a cam-
paign and a bank of the Tigris to ourselves. ‘ Eye-
witness’ rightly chose to be with the other
divisions across theriver. Inevitably the 7th Meerut
Division got the meagrest show in such meagre
dispatches as the Censors allowed him to send home.
The 2nd Leicestershires, an old and proud bat-
talion, with the greatest of reputations on the field
of action, remained unknown to the Press and
public. Our other two British battalions, the
Ist Seaforths and the znd Black Watch, could be
referred to—even the Censors allowed this—as
‘Highlanders’; and those who were interested
knew that the reference lay between these two
regiments and the Highland Light Infantry. But
who was going to connect the rare reference to
‘ Midlanders ’ with the Leicestershires ?

In May, 1917, the 7th Division tried to put to-
gether, for the Press, a connected account of their
campaigning since Maude’s offensive began. After
various people, well qualified to do the work, had
refused, it was devolved on me, on_the simple
grounds that a padre, as is well known, has only
one day of work a week. The notion fell through.
The authorities declined flatly to allow any refer-
ence to units by name, and no one took any more
interest in a task so useless and soulless. But I
had collected so much information from different
units that I determined some day to try to put the
story together. I have now selected two cam-
paigns, those for railhead and for Tekrit, and made
a straightforward narrative. From a multitude
of such narratives the historian will build up his
work hereafter.

—————— eee ee eee

PREFACE 9

An article by General Wauchope appeared in
Blackwood’s, ‘The Battle that won Samarrah.’
This article not only stressed the fact that the Black
Watch were first in Baghdad and Samarra—an
accident ; they were the freshest unit on each
occasion, while other units were exhausted from
fighting just finished—but dismissed the second
day of ‘the battle that won Samarra’ with one
long paragraph, from which the reader could get
no other meaning except the one that this day also
was won bythe same units as did the fighting of the
21st. This was a handling of fact which appealed
neither to the Black Watch, whose achievements
need no aid of embellishment from imagination,
nor to the Leicestershires, who were made to appear
spectators through the savage fighting of two days.
If the reader turns to the chapter in this book en-
titled ‘ The Battle for Samarra,’ he will learn what
actually happened on April 22, 1917. The only
other reference in print, that I know of, to the fight-
ing for Samarra is the chapter in Mr. Candler’s
book. This, he tells us, was largely taken over
by him from a journalist who visited our battle-
fields during the lull of summer. He showed the
account to officers of my division, myself among
them, and they added a few notes. But the
chapter remained bare and comparatively uninterest-
ing beside the accounts of actions which Mr. Candler
had witnessed.

For this book, then, my materials have been :
First, my own experience of events quorum ego
pars minima. Next, my own note-books, care-
fully kept over a long period in Mesopotamia and
Palestine, a period from which these two campaigns

10 PREFACE

of Samarra and Tekrit have been selected. Thirdly,
I saw regimental war-diaries and talked with brigade
and regimental officers. Most of all, from the
Leicestershires I gained information. It is rarely
any use to question men about an action; even
if they speak freely, they say little which is of value
on the printed page. One may live with a regi-
mental mess for months, running into years, as
I did with the Leicestershires’ subalterns, and hear
little that is illuminating, till some electric spark
may start a fire of living reminiscence. But from
many of my comrades, at one time and another, I
have picked up a fact. I am especially indebted
to Captain J. O. C. Hasted, D.S.O., for permission
to use his lecture on the Samarra battle. I could
have used this lecture still more with great gain ;
but I did not wish to impair its interest in itself,
as it should be published. From Captain F. J.
Diggins, M.C., I gained a first-hand account of
the capture of the Turkish guns. And Major
Kenneth Mason, M.C., helped me with information
in the Tekrit fighting. My brother, Lieutenant
A. R. Thompson, drew the maps.

In conclusion, though the Mesopotamian War
was of minor importance beside the fighting in
Western Europe, for the chronicler it has its own
advantages. If our fighting was on a smaller scale,
we saw it more clearly. The 7th Division, as I
have said, usually had a campaign, with its battles,
to themselves. We were not a fractional part of
an eruption along many hundreds of miles; we were
our own little volcano. And it was the opinion
of many of us that on no front was there such com-
radeship ; yet many had come from France, and two

PREFACE Dia

divisions afterwards saw service on the Palestine
front. Nor can any front have had so many grim
jokes as those with which we kept ourselves sane
through the long-drawn failure before Kut and the
dragging months which followed.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 2 5 : :
I. BELED
II. HARBE é : :
Ill. THE FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT
IV. THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA
V. SUMMER AND WAITING . P ;
VI. HUWESLET ; OR, ‘THE BATTLE OF JUBER
ISLAND’ : :
VII. DAUR : ‘ :
VIII. AUJEH ; : .
IX. TEKRIT : :
X. DOWN TO BUSRA .

13

PAGE
15
2
48
59
70

104

I20
124
131
135
145

INTRODUCTION

On November 6, 1914, Brigadier-General Delamaine
captured Fao forts, and the Mesopotamian War.
began in the smallest possible way, the proverbial
‘corporal’s guard’ breaking into an empire.

The next twelve months saw a great deal of
fighting, unorthodox in every way, carried through
in appalling weathers and with the most inadequate
forces.

In the three days’ battle at Shaiba, in April,
defeat was hardly escaped.

In April and May General Gorringe conducted
the Ahwaz operations, near the Persian border,
with varying success, and threatened Amara, on
the Tigris, midway between Busra and Baghdad.

In May Townshend began his advance up-country.
By June 3 he had taken Q’urna, where Tigris and
Euphrates mingle; presently his miscellaneous
marine and a handful of men took Amara, in what
was known as ‘Townshend’s Regatta.’ Seventeen
guns and nearly two thousand prisoners were taken
at Amara.

In the heats of July, incredible as it sounds,
Gorringe was fighting on the Euphrates, by Nasiri-
yeh, taking twenty-one guns and over a thousand
prisoners.

On September 28 Townshend won his last victory
at Kut-el-Amara, taking fourteen guns and eleven

15

16 INTRODUCTION

hundred prisoners. Every one knows what fol-
lowed: how Ctesiphon was fought in November,
with four thousand five hundred and sixty-seven
casualties, and how his force raced back toKut. On
December 7 Kut wasinvested by the Turks.
Townshend’s stand here saved the lower country to
us.

Relief forces disembarked at Ali Gharbi, between
Amara and Kut, and some of the bitterest fighting
the world has seen began. Sheikh Saad (January 6
to 8) was a costly victory. A gleam of hope came
with the Russian offensive in Northern Asia Minor.
On January 13, at the Wadi, six miles beyond
Sheikh Saad and less than thirty miles from Kut,
the Turks held us up, but slipped away in the
night.

All advancing was over flat ground devoid of
even scrub-cover, through a region the most desolate
in the world. Above Amara there is a place
called ‘Lone-Tree Village,’ which has a small tree
ten feet high. Except for a handful of draggled
palms at Sheikh Saad, this tree is the only one till
Kut is reached, on a river frontage of sixty miles.

On January 20 the British suffered a heavy
repulse at Umm-el-Hanna, five miles beyond the
Wadi. For nearly seven weeks our troops sat
down in the swamps, and died of disease. The
rains were abnormal.

On March 8 a long flank march up the right bank
of the Tigris took the enemy by surprise, and
reached Dujaileh, less than ten miles from Kut.
Time was wasted in an orthodox but unnecessary
bombardment. The Turks swarmed back into
the redoubt, and we were bloodily thrust back,

INTRODUCTION ad

and returned to our lines before Hanna, with heavy
losses in men and transport. After that very few
cherished any hope of saving Kut.

April was a month of terrible fighting, frontal
attacks on a very brave and exultant enemy. The
13th Division, from Gallipoli, took the Hanna
trenches, which were practically deserted, on
April 5. The day went well for us. In the after-
noon Abu Roman lines on the right bank, and
in the evening those of Felahiyeh on the left bank,
were carried by storm. But next day the first
of the five battles of Sannaiyat was fought. We
were repulsed.

The Turk’s procedure was easy. He shot us
down as we advanced over flat country. We dug
ourselves in four hundred yards away (say). Then
we sapped up to within storming distance, and
attacked again, to find that the lines were thinly
held, with a machine-gun or two, but that another
position awaited us beyond, at the end of a long
level sweep of desert.

On April 9 came the second battle of Sannatyat.
The time has not come to speak frankly of this
day; but our men lay in heaps. So from the
16th to the 18th we tried frontal attacks on the
other bank, the right again. This was the battle
of Beit Aiessa. We did so well that the enemy had
to counter-attack, which he did in the most deter-
mined manner, forcing us back. It cost him at
least three thousand dead; but by this day’s
work he made sure of Kut and its garrison. Our
one hope now was in the Russians. But their
offensive halted; and we fought, on the 22nd,
the third of the Sannaiyat battles. On the 2gth,

B

18 INTRODUCTION

after a siege of one hundred and forty-three days,
Kut surrendered, and with it the biggest British
force ever taken by any enemy.

A summer inexpressibly harassing and depressed
followed ; but towards the end of 1916 affairs were
reorganized, and at last a general was found. On
the night of December 13 we crossed the Shat-el-Hai,
and Maude’s attack on Kut began. Ten weeks
of fighting, very little interrupted by the weather,
followed. It was stern work, hand-to-hand and
trench-to-trench, as in France. By the end of
the third week in Febryary Kut was doomed.
The Turk had made the mistake of leaving small,
unsupported groups of men in angles and corners
of the Tigris. Maude destroyed these, and between
the 22nd and the 25th launched his final attacks
simultaneously on both banks. A badly managed
attack on Sannaiyat had failed on the 17th; but
now, on the 22nd, the lines were stormed. Fighting
continued here, and the river was crossed and
bridged behind the Turks, above Kut, at Shumran.
The Sannaiyat garrison fled precipitately, and
the 7th Indian Division occupied successively the
Nakhailat and Suwada lines with no opposition
worth mentioning. Kut fell automatically, the
monitors steaming in and taking possession. The
infantry had no time to bother about it. Kut
had become a symbol only.

So the infantry swung by Kut and on to Baghdad.
The cavalry and gunboats hunted the enemy
northward, till he made a stand on the Diyaleh,
a large stream entering the Tigris a few miles below
Baghdad. Very heavy fighting and losses had
come to the 13th Division, and the 7th Division

INTRODUCTION 19

would be the first to acknowledge that the honour
of first entering Baghdad, for whatever it was
worth, should have fallen to them. But, in spite
of desperate attempts to cross, they were held on
the Diyaleh. The 7th Division therefore bridged
the river lower down, and after two days of battle
in a sandstorm, blind with thirst—for the men
had one water-bottle only for the two days—
captured Baghdad railway-station, and threw
pickets across the river into Baghdad town. This
was on March 11. The 13th and r4th Divisions
then crossed the Diyaleh, and were in Baghdad
almost as soon as any one from the 7th Division.
The 7th and 3rd Indian Divisions passed by
Baghdad on opposite sides, as they had passed
by Kut, and engaged the enemy’s rearguards at
Mushaidiyeh and in the Jebel Hamrin. They
then concentrated again towards Baghdad.

This book deals first with the April campaign
as it affected the right bank of the Tigris. Between
Baghdad and Samarra was a stretch of eighty
miles of railroad, the only completed portion,
south of Mosul, of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway.
If we could capture this the Turk would have to
supply his troops from Mosul by the treacherous
and shallow Tigris. The Samarra fighting, these
railhead battles, was the last organized campaign
which the Turk fought. Our First Corps, consisting
of two Indian divisions, the 3rd and the 7th,
operated against railhead; while the Third Corps,
consisting of the 13th Division, the only all-British
division in Mesopotamia, and the 14th Indian
Division, fought their way up the left bank.

After Samarra fell the Turk could do nothing

20 INTRODUCTION

but collect small bodies of troops, which we attacked
in detail, usually with success, and throughout
1918, after Tekrit, always attacked with complete
success (as we did at Ramadie in September, 1917,
destroying the whole force). Ramadie, on the
Euphrates, and Tekrit, on the Tigris, were the
first of the campaigns of this last phase of the
Mesopotamian War, campaigns that were glorified
raids. At the time of Tekrit, General Allenby
settled for the Turk, once for all,the choice between
Palestine and Mesopotamia.

Our Tekrit campaign was a sympathetic attack,
concurrent with Allenby’s great Gaza offensive.
This campaign is the theme of the second portion
of this book.

BELED

Red of gladiolus glimmering through the wheat—
Red flower of Valour springing at our feet !

Dark-flowered hyacinth mingling with the red—
Dark flower of Patience on the way we tread !

Scarlet of poppy waving o’er the grass—
Honour’s bright flags along the road we pass!

Thorns that torment, and grassy spikes that fret,
Thistles that all the fiery way beset !

These shall be theirs, when Duty’s day is sped;
They shall lie down, the living and the dead.

rt. THE WAY TO BELED

BacupaD fell on March 11, 1917. The soldier’s
joy was deepened by the belief that here his warfare
was accomplished, his marching finished. Even
when we went by the city, and fought battles on
either bank, the 7th Indian Division at Mushaidiyeh
(March 14) and the 3rd Indian, most disastrously,.
in the foothills of the Jebel Hamrin (March 25),
this comfort was not destroyed. These two hard
actions were but the sweeping away of ants’ nests
from before a house; our position now secured,
we should fall back, and rest in Baghdad. The
Turk might try to turn us out; but that was a
21

22 BELED

very different affair, and it would be months before
he could even dream of an offensive.

So in April the 7th Division had withdrawn to
Baghdad, all except the 28th Brigade, who were
at Babi, a dozen miles up-stream. At Babiit was
not yet desert—there was grass and wheat; but
the garden-belt and trees had finished.

On the 3rd came official news that Tennant,
of the R.F.C., had landed among the Cossacks,
and been tumultuously welcomed; presently we
heard that the Russians and ourselves had joined
hands. This was towards the Persian border,
on the left bank of the Tigris, where the 13th and
14th Divisions were operating. That force and
ours, the 7th, were now to advance together on
Samarra; a new campaign was beginning, in
which we took the right bank.

A Mobile Column was formed, under Brigadier-
General Davies, as the spearhead of the 7th Division’s
thrust. It consisted of the 28th Infantry Brigade
(2nd Leicestershires, 51st and 53rd Sikhs, 56th
Rifles, and 136th Machine-Gun Company), the
oth Brigade, R.F.A. (less one battery), one section
of the 524th Battery, R.F.A., a Light-Armoured
Motor-Battery, the 32nd Lancers (less two
squadrons), and a half-company of Sappers and
Miners ; an ammunition column and ambulances.

Fritz—the enemy’s airman—inspected us before
we started. Then the Leicestershires, by twelve
and eight miles, marched in two days to a point
opposite Sindiyeh, on the Tigris. The Indian
battalions cut across country to Sumaikchah,
which lies inland.

That day and night by Sindiyeh! ‘ Infandum

BELED 23

jubes venovare dolorem.’ The day was one of
burning discomfort, spent in cracks and nullas,
under blanket bivouacs. We had tramped, from
dawn, through eight miles of ‘chivvy-dusters,’
and our camp was now among them. These are
a grass which crams the clothes and feet with
maddening needles; once in they seemed there
‘for duration.’ The soldier out East knows them
for his worst foe on a march. Lest we should
be obsessed with these, we were infested with
sandflies and mosquitoes. But large black ants
were the principal line in vermin. At dinner they
swarmed over us. Man after man dropped his
plate and leapt into a dervish-dance, frenziedly
slapping hisnoseandears. We tried to eat standing;
even so, we were festooned. Little Westlake, the
‘Cherub,’ abandoned all hope of nourishment, and
crept wretchedly into a clothes-pile. There was
no sleep that night.

The river ran beneath lofty bluffs; on the left
bank was a far-stretching view of low, rich country,
with palms and canals. Fritz visited us, and a
monitor favoured us with some comically bad
shooting. And after sundown came a moon,
benignant, calm, in a cloudless heaven, looking
down on men miserable with small vexations,
which haply saved them from facing too much the
deeper griefs which accompanied them.

Next morning, Good Friday, we joined the rest
of the column at Sumaikchah. The Cherub with
his scouts went ahead to find a road. All the field
was jumping with grasshoppers, on which storks
were feeding. Scattered bushes looked in the
mirage like enemy patrols. We were escorted by

-

ae

tang igh

a ee ‘
pe os appt

Lower

bof ;
| esata ah ae | Me SorOTAMIA |

26 BELED

Fritz, whose kindly interest in our movements
never flagged. We started late, at 6.50 a.m.,
and without breakfast, the distance being under-
estimated. A zigzagging course made the journey
into over ten miles, in dreadful heat; we were
marching till past noon. When Sumaikchah came
in sight, men fell out, exhausted, in bunches and
groups.

Though we were unmolested, the countryside
was full of eyes. Shortly afterwards an artillery
officer, bringing up remounts, sent a Scots sergeant
ahead to Sumaikchah, with a strong escort, to
bring back rations. The party was fired on by
Buddus. The sergeant’s report attained some fame ;
deservedly, so I give it here:

“We were fired on, sirrr.’

‘ Did you fire back?’

‘No, sirrr. I thocht it would have enrrraged
them. But I’d have ye know, sirrr, that it’s
hairrrdly safe to be aboot.’

We came, says Xenophon, to ‘a large and thickly
populated city named Sittake.’ His troopsencamped
‘near a large and beautiful park, which was thick
with all sorts of trees, at a distance of fifteen stades
from the river.’: | This description still holds true
of Sumaikchah. The ancient irrigation channels
are dry, and the town has shrunken ; but it remains
a large garden-village. Here were melons and
oranges, fowls and turkeys, exorbitantly priced,
of course; possibly Xenophon’s troops got their
goods more cheaply in the year 399 B.c.

Sumaikchah is an oasis with eighty wells. The

1 Anabasis, Book ii., H.G. Dakyns’ translation. The identification
of Sumaikchah and Sittake is due to Major Kenneth Mason, R.E., M.C,

BELED 27

water was full of salts. It was bad as water; it
was execrable as tea. Many of the wells on the
Baghdad-Samarra Railway have these natural
salts. Every one who left Sumaikchah next morning
was suffering from diarrhoea. Here again one
remembers the Anabasis and the troublesome ex-
perience which the notes I read at school ascribed
to poisonous honey gathered from the flowers of
rhododendron ponticum.

Our brief stay here was unlike anything we had
known, except in our racing glimpse of the flowery
approaches to Kut. The village had palms and
rose bushes. A coarse hyacinth, found already
at Mushaidiyeh, now seeding, grew along the railway
and in the wheat. We camped amid green corn ;
round us were storksbills, very many, and a white
orchis, slight and easily hidden, the same orchis
that I found afterwards in Palestine and in the
Hollow Vale of Syria. A small poppy and a bright
thistle set their flares of crimson and gold in the
green; sowthistle and myosote freaked it with
blue; a tall gladiolus, also to be found later by
the Aujeh and on Carmel, made pink clusters.
Thus did flowers overlay the fretting spikes of our
road, and adorn and hide ‘the coming bulk of
Death.’

Through Saturday we rested. Fritz came, of
course ; and there was a little harmless sniping.

The knowledge filtered in that fighting was again
at hand. It was accepted without comment, with
the soldier’s well-known fatalism, the child of
faith and despair. ‘Every man thinks,’ said one
to me, ‘I don’t care who he is. But we believe
it’s all right till our number’s up. Take M :

28 BELED

for instance. When he was left out at Sannaiyat we
all envied him; we thought we were for it. But
we went through Sannaiyat; and M was
the first of us to be killed at Mushaidiyeh, his
very first action, where we had hardly any casualties.’

In the evening the rest of the division came up
to take our place. Sunday, by old prescription,
was the 7th Division’s battle-day; next Sunday
being Easter, it was not to be supposed that so
fair an occasion would be passed over. Accordingly,
when I put in my services, I was told that the
brigade would march before dawn, and that some
scrapping was anticipated. The Turks were holding
Beled Station, half a dozen miles away in a straight
line. Their main force was at Harbe, four miles
farther. The maps were no use, and distances
had to be guessed. ‘ The force against us,’ observed
the Brigade-Major, ‘is somewhere between a
hundred Turks and two guns, and four thousand
Turks and thirty-two guns.’ ‘ And if it’s the four
thousand and thirty-two guns?’ ‘Then we shall
sit tight, and scream for help,’ he answered
delightedly.

2. THE ACTION FOR BELED

Davies’s Column were away before breakfast.
In the dim light we moved through wet fields of
some kind of globe-seeded plant, abundantly
variegated with gladiolus and hyacinth. Every
one was suffering from our course of Sumaikchah
waters, and progress was slow. Splashing through
the marshes, we came to undulating upland, long,
steady slopes, pebble-strewn and with pockets of
grass and poppies. The morning winds made

BELED 29

these uplands exceedingly beautiful. Colonel
Knatchbull said, the week he died, that what he
most remembered from Beled were the flowers
through which we marched to battle. As we
approached them, the ruffling wind laid its hand
on the grasses, and they became emerald waves,
a green spray of blades tossing and flashing in the
full sunlight. As we passed, the same wind bowed
them before it, and they were a shining, silken
cloth. The poppies were a larger sort than those
in the wheatfields, and of a very glorious crimson.
In among the grasses was yellow coltsfoot ; among
the pebbles were sowthistle, mignonette, pink
bindweed, and great patches of storksbill. Many
noted the beauty of these flowers, a scene so un-
Mesopotamian in its brightness. We were tasting
of the joy and life of springtide in happier latitudes,
a wine long praetermitted to our lips; and among
us were those who would not drink of this wine
again till they drank it new in their Father’s King-
dom. After Beled we saw no more flowers.
With the first line was my friend Private W :
As we pushed forward he looked up, as his custom
was, for a ‘message.’ Perchance, with so many
fears and hopes stirring, there was some buzzing
along the heavenly wires; but the only word he
could get was this one,*“ Because.’ He puzzled
upon it, till the whole flashed on his brain—‘ Because
Thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips
shall praise Thee.’ Thenceforward he went his
ways content ; neither can any man have gathered
greater pleasure from the beauty of the morning
and those unwonted flowers than this Plymouth
Brother, a gardener by profession, and, as I found

30 BELED

in later days, amid the rich deep meadows of the
Holy Land, a passionate lover of all wild plants.

The left flank was guarded by one section of
machine-gunners and one section of the 32nd
Lancers. Next to them moved the Leicestershires.
Some time after 8 a.m. rifle-fire on our left told us
that the Cherub’s scouts were in touch with enemy
patrols. About 9.30 the first shell came, our
advanced guard being some five thousand yards
from Beled Station.

There were frequent halts, while our few cavalry
reconnoitred. Then we passed into a deep broad
nulla between two ancient earth-walls. All this
terrain had been a network of canals and cultiva-
tion. Shrapnel was bursting in our front. We
filed out, at the left, on to a plain. Half a mile
ahead was the nearer curve of a hilly ground. The
main range ran in a Carpathian-like sweep across
our front, from west to east; turned, and went
across our front again. Beyond this was Beled
Station, lying at the point of a wide fork of hills,
the left prong a good mile away, but the right
bending almost up to it. From the forking to
the station was a broken plain of two thousand
yards. This plain had to be overcome, with such
assistance as the hills gave. The hills were pretty
uniform in height, and nowhere above thirty feet.
The railway cut directly through the main range,
giving the enemy a field of fire for his machine-guns.
The range, with its double fold across our front,
gave the artillery cover, and enabled us to conceal
the smallness of our force; and on both sides of
the station it broke into a wilderness of little knobs
and hollows, by which we might creep up.

BELED 31

The shrapnel was uncomfortably close as we
crossed to the first sweep of hilly ground. But
it was bursting high, and no casualties occurred.
We halted behind the hills, and the artillery left
their wagons, taking their guns into position where
the range curved north-westerly. Here two four-
gun batteries put up a slow and not heavy bombard-
ment on the station. We waited and watched the
shrapnel bursting five hundred yards to our right.
About noon the Leicestershires were ordered to
support the 53rd and 51st Sikhs in an attack on
_ the station. (The 56th Rifles were in reserve
throughout the action.) D Company was to move
on the left of the railway as a flank-guard, and
went forward under Captain Creagh.

I must now speak of Second-Lieutenant Fowke,
our tallest subaltern. In place of the orthodox
shade of khaki he wore a reddish-brown shooting-
jacket, which shimmered like bright silk if
there was any sun. Nevertheless he was the only
Leicestershire subaltern who went through all
our battles unwounded. Of his cheerfulness and
courage, his wit, and the love with which his col-
leagues and his men regarded him, the reader will
learn. Fowke was detached with his platoon to
act on our extreme left in co-operation with our
handful of Indian cavalry. The operation was an
undesirable one, to advance into a maze of tiny hills,
held by an enemy of unknown strength; and as
Fowke moved off I remembered the Sieur de Join-
ville’s Memoirs and a passage mentioned between
us the previous day. So, as I wished him good
luck, I said, ‘ Be of good cheer, seneschal, for we
shall yet talk over this day in the ladies’ bowers.’

32 BELED

Once upon a time Fowke had read for Holy Orders,
a fact which contributed not a little to the astonish-
ment and delight with which he was regarded.
He smiled gravely in answer to me, and moved on.
But after the scrap he told me that he wished just
then that he had continued in his first vocation
and become a padre.

Behind D Company moved Charles Copeman,
O.C. bombers, and a section of machine-gunners
under Lieutenant Service. The rest of the machine-
gunners followed up along the railway.

We who remained crossed the ridge and advanced
in artillery formation up the right side of the
railway. The Sikhs slipped away into the hills
to our right.

Readers of Quentin Durward will remember the
two hangmen of Louis XI, the one tall, lean, and
solemn; the other short, fat, and jolly. Wilson,
the Leicestershires’ doctor, had two most excellent
assistants who occupied much the same positions.
But Sergeant Whitehead, who was short, went his
sombre way with a gravity that never weakened
into a smile; while Dobson, an ex-miner, aged
forty-seven, who had deceived the recruiting people
most shamelessly and enlisted as under thirty,
took life jovially and generally humorously. He
was never without his pipe. He enjoyed a large
medical practice in the regiment, unofficial and
unpaid, and he heid strong opinions, observing
frequently that he ‘didn’t hold with’ a thing.
I remember well the annoyance of Wilson’s successor
on hearing that Dobson ‘ didn’t hold with ’ inocula-
tion, which just then was occupying most of the
medical officer’s time. Another thing that Dobson

BELED 33

‘didn’t hold with’ was the modern notion that
some diseases were infectious. Because of his
years and medical knowledge, this kindly, never-
wearied old hero was always known by the regiment
as ‘Mester Dobson.’ I shall follow their example,
and so call him henceforth.

I also was of Wilson’s entourage, and went
with him accordingly. Before we crossed the first
ridge we picked up a man prostrate with heat-
stroke ; we left him under a culvert, in charge of
John, Wilson’s Indian orderly.

Meanwhile D Company found the hills on our
left strongly held. Every slope was sown with
shallow trenches, earth-scars which held six or
seven Turks, and snipers caused us casualties.
Lieutenant-Colonel Knatchbull, learning this, on
his own initiative swung round B and C Companies
across the railway to support D. Wilson now came
upon his first casualty, a signaller hit in the spine.
We bandaged him, and left him in a shallow nulla,
sheltered from the bullets flying over. He died
next day. :

B and C Companies, crossing the railway, pushed
up a long narrow nulla to the hills where D were
engaged. Service’s machine-guns put up a covering
fire.

The attack had now developed along two dis-
tinct lines, and on the railway itself we had no
troops. The enemy presently put down a barrage
of shrapnel all the right length of the line, where
he had seen our men cross, of which barrage every
shell during two hours was wasted. As Wilson
dropped down the embankment on our left side of
the railway, we found machine-gunners sheltering

Cc

34 BELED

in a quarry, awaiting orders. ‘ It’s unhealthy over
there,’ said their O.C., Lieutenant Sanderson.
‘The Turks have a machine-gun on it.’ How-
ever, there was a lull as we crossed to the nulla,
and only a very few bullets went by. Inthe nulla
Wilson set up his aid-post, sticking a second flag
above the railway, for the solitary company that
was supporting the Sikhs’ attack. Wounded began
to come in, the first cases being not bad ones.
“Give you five rupees for that wound, sergeant,’
said Mester Dobson. ‘You can’t have it for
seventy-five,’ said Sergeant Hayes, as he limped off
in search of the ambulances, smiling happily.
Perhaps nothing will stir the unborn generations
to greater pity than this knowledge, that for youth
in our generation wounds and bodily hurt were
a luxury.

But cases soon came in of men badly hit, in much
pain. With them was borne a dead man, Sergeant
Lawrence, D.C.M., a quiet and much-liked man.
My Plymouth Brother friend came also, and sat
easide, saying he could wait, as a stretcher-case was
following him. As the doctor saw to that broken
body, myt riend rested his wounded leg, and we had
some talk. The long marches, the nights of little
sleep, and the unsheltered days of heat and toil and
wearied waiting for evening had tired him out. ‘I
want rest,’ he said, ‘and I think the Lord knows it,
and has sent rest along.’ All our men were brave
and cheerful, but no more cheerful hero limped
off through the bullets than my calm and gentle
friend.

Wilson went out for a few minutes to see a man in
the second line, hit in the groin. When he returned

BELED 35

we had some cruelly broken cases in, and that
nulla saw a deal of pain, and grew stale with the
smell of blood. <A fair number of bullets flew over,
and there was the occasional swish of a machine-
gun. Mules were killed far back in the second line,
and men hit. But the nulla was safe. The mis-
guided Turk shelled and machine-gunned the empty
space beyond the railway.

Colonel Knatchbull came in and assured Wilson
that the nulla was the best and most central place
for the aid-post. He searched the front with his
glasses. Then he said, ‘ Marner’s dead.’

The Leicestershires’ attack was held up in the
hills. They asked for support, but none was avail-
able. They were told to advance as far as they
could, and then hold their line till help could come.
The hills were thick with excellent positions. Every
fold and dip was utilized by a scattered and numer-
ous foe, to whom the ragged ground was like a cloak
of invisibility. No artillery help could be given.
We could only seize the ground’s advantage and
make it serve as help to the attack as well as to the
defence. It was here that Marner fell. C Company
was sheltering in an ancient canal. Seeing a man
fall, Captain Hasted called out, ‘ Keep your heads
down.’ Almost at that moment Marner looked
over, having spotted a sniper who was vexing us,
and fell dead at Grant-Anderson’s feet. Though
in falling he brushed against Hasted, the latter
could not pause to see who it was ; nor did he know
till he cried out, a minute later, that Marner was to
move round the flank of the position immediately
before them. Some two hundred yards farther on
Second-Lieutenant Otter was struck by a bullet

36 BELED

which went through both left arm and body, a bad
but not fatal wound. But a gracious thought came
to the Turkish gunners. Seeing us without artillery
support from our own guns, they put two rounds
of shrapnel over, the only shells on these ridges
during the fight. These burst directly on the
Turkish snipers, who did not wait for the hint to be
repeated, but went. The Leicestershires topped
the last ridge, and were on the plain before the
station. Fowke and Service remained to guard the
left flank, while Hasted went forward with the
bayonet to clear the hills to the left. Fowke, watch-
ing benevolently the evolutions of certain horsemen
on his left, received a message from our cavalry,
‘Those are Arabs on your left, and are hostile to
you.’

And now it would have meant a bloody advance
for A and B Companies against those trenches in the
open. But the Turks, held by the Leicestershires’
strong steadyattack, had given insufficient attention
to the movement threatening their left. The two
Sikh regiments, though checked and held from time
to time by rifle and machine-gun fire, used the
broken ground with extraordinary skill. Their
experience on the Afghan frontier had trained them
for just such work as this. Rising ground was used
as positions for covering fire, and every knoll and
hummock became a shoulder to lift the force along.
Their supporting battery had located the enemy’s
gun-positions, and kept down his fire. One gun-
team bolted, and the crew were seen getting the gun
away by hand and losing in the effort. The Sikhs
rushed a low hill, which had long checked them, and
its garrison of one officer and twenty-five men

BELED 37

surrendered. This attack was led by the well-known
‘Boomer ’ Barrett, colonel of the 51st. He slapped
the nearest prisoner on the back and _ bellowed
“Shabash.* The enemy’s resistance crumbled
rapidly. A breach had been made in his defence,
and the Sikhs poured through. They made two
thousand yards, and did a swift left-turn. The
enemy on their right slipped off, but the Turks in
the trenches covering the station had left things too
late. The 51st drove the foe before them to the
north of the station, and the 53rd rushed the station
itself, capturing eight officers and a hundred and
thirty-five men, with two machine-guns. This was
about 3 p.m.

Wilson now left his aid-post, and we came up the
line. All the way the Turk was shelling the railway,
but, by that fortunate defect of observation con-
spicuous throughout, shelling our right exclusively,
for not a shell came on the left. We passed the
enemy’s trenches and rifle-pits, which scarred some
six or seven hundred yards of space before the
station ; there were rifles leaning against the walls,
with bayonets fixed.

The station had excellent water, a greatattraction
after the filthy wells of Sumaikchah. Noone heeded
that the Turk was dropping shells two thousand yards
our side of the station. ‘He always does that.
It’s a sort of rearguard business. It’s the ammuni-
tion he can’t get away. He’ll be moving his guns
quickly enough when we get oursontothem.’ But,
as the official report afterwards observed, with just
annoyance at the enemy’s refusal to recognize that
the action was finished: ‘ During the whole of the

1* Well done’ (Hindustani).

38 BELED

afternoon and till dusk the enemy continued to
shell the captured position with surprising intensity,
considering what had been heard of his shortage
in gun-ammunition.’ What happened, in fuller
detail, was this.

Beled Station was like the gate of Heaven. With
the exception of the Leicestershires, still in the field,
all the great and good were gathered there. The
first I saw was that genial philosopher, Captain
Newitt, of the 53rd Sikhs, sitting imperturbable on
a fallen wall and smoking the pipe without which
he has never been seen. Not Marius amid Carthage
ruins was more careless of the desolation around
him. With him was Culverwell, adjutant of the
same battalion. They hailed me with joyous
affection, and we drank the waters and swapped
thenews. General Davies cameupandasked, ‘Have
the Leicesters taken any prisoners?’ I told him
‘No.’ He seemed disappointed; then added,
‘We've taken over two hundred prisoners, includ-
ing nine officers and three machine-guns. What
were your casualties?’ ‘ About twenty, sir,’ I said.
‘The 53rd have had thirteen men wounded,’ said
the Brigade-Major. ‘ Fifty will cover the casualties
for the whole brigade. It’s been a most successful
action.’

Marner’s loss was greatly felt. ‘I hear you’ve
lost a good officer,’ said the Brigadier; and the
Brigade-Major added, ‘He was the brigade’s great
stand-by for maps and drawings. Idon’t know how
we can replace him.’

Then for a moment we fell to jape and jesting ;
foolishly, for the Gods are always listening, and the
Desert-Gods have long ears. ‘ You're last from

BELED 39

school,’ said Brigade-Major McLeod. ‘ You know
Napier’s message—‘‘ Peccavi, I have Sind.” Give
me a) wire for Corps; ‘I have B-led.”’
«“ Sanguinevt,”’’ I said, ‘ifsuch a verb exists. Let’s
call it very late Latin.’

As we spoke, the enemy shortened his range;
a shell skimmed the roof, and burst at the embank-
ment bottom, directly under two Sikhs who were
cooking. It hurled one man into the air and the
other to one side. A great dust went up. Before
most people realized what had happened, Wilson
and Stones were carrying the men up the bank.
This was an extremely brave deed, for a second shell
was certain, and, as a matter of fact, a second anda
third camejustas theyhad reached ourwall. Stones,
like many medical officers, was amissionary ; he had
come from West Africa. He had one of the noblest
faces I ever saw; a very gentle and courteous man,
fearless and with eager eyes. He served with the
56th Rifles.

One of the stricken men was a mass of bleeding
ribbons, the top of his head blown off. A cloth
was drawn over his face; he was dead. The other
had his left leg torn off below the knee, hisright heel
blown away, and wounds in his head and stomach.
He died that evening. Now he lay with scarcely a
moan, while Sikhs gathered round and gave such
consolation as was possible, an austere, brave
group.

The Turkish gunners now concentrated on the
station and its approaches. Our cavalry rode
through the Leicestershires’ lines as those warriors
moved up to an advanced line of defence. They
brought a wounded prisoner. The enemy instantly

> BOD AVY) HILBUIG
“WOIWTLG = OAN3{Q wos WOw>Y

Bivwixouady

3I51V>5

Vv

Sa eS awe” me) oe

o Sompany ; Qed ewe

Ad Yance.

s
~
wy
&%
SAS
WAS
é ~~ ws
i Neeiyy Wr
Myre CU yy aie oN
WAS =-_ Oy = wt .
= % “14, wz = MTTO LL Ss,
“Uy Gy tert
z eT TOD Wee a
MU = — = Ty
c. HE [rity ne 2 a a
S 8
eo D>
oo
—
Ca .
ies
a

77}

— ee

Zé
eG,
S
LE 4
t Ne [s)
\ “Se
) a Zs
i “ee
“ny
4
' “Wy 4. :
“Me M YS
WY “Ly 7 ow
\ os uy, 2 .
( Nall Pen es yr
i aT uaF, UU yer aey gnttQUO Ye vu
MTT TT, “J w
=~ es Mia TU Tore (epnsttS
—
‘ars :
— aa ow 2 S
oe
zZ 2%
re
E >
“~
o
3

an

Geumzay Pre SAIS

2137) Kumeu

G74 Ue pure 2370

Romnw.sS
o232739

P
Q &
5 ®
§ 4
Sg
ie
Ee

42 BELED

shrapnelled them, and they scattered, the prisoner,
for all his broken leg, keeping his seat excellently
andriding surprisinglyfast. Luck had been with the
battalion this day, and it now remained with them.
Many had rifles hit. Fowke, who was a magnet for
bullets, had his right shoulder’s star flattened.
But there were no casualties. The enemy, growing
vindictive, chased small bodies of even three or four
with shrapnel. He continued to pelt the station,
throwing at least two hundred rounds on it in two
hours. Mules and horses were hit, and many men.
Isolated men, holding horses in the open, had a bad
time. Several shells landed on the roof, and had
there been against us the huge guns of other fronts
the station would have gone up in dust. When I
saw it again, a month later, I realized what a rough
house that tiny spot had experienced. Unexploded
shells were still in the walls, and on the inner wall of
the side that had sheltered me I counted over twenty
direct hits. Fortunately the 5.9’s were not in action
this day, and every station on the Baghdad-Samarra
line has been built as a fortress, massively. By
incredible luck no shell came through the doorless
openings and rooms behind us; they struck the
inner wall and roof. But the water-station behind
us gave very poor shelter to the men there. Shells
burst on the railway, and sent a sheet of smoke and
rubble beforethem. Two of our guns came up to the
hills that had covered the Sikhs’ advance, but fired
very few shells, failing to finda target. The enemy
saw their flashes, and fired back without effect.
Then Fritz came and hovered above our huddled
crowd with low, deliberate circles. We took it for
granted he would bomb us, or, at kindest, spot for

BELED 43

his guns. But he just hung over us, and then went
to look for our batteries.

Before this McLeod offered me a cup of tea. We
drank it ina tin shed a few yards south of the station.
I wanted the tea horribly, but felt it was ‘ hairrdly
safe to be aboot.’ This feeling was shared, for when
the staff-captain and signalling-officer joined us,
the latter asked, ‘ Isn’t this spot a bit unhealthy,
sine Oh, not) said) McLeod...“ It’s quite. safe
from splinters, and it’s no use bothering about a
direct hit.’ As I had seenhighexplosive burst pretty
well all round, and both windows were smashed of
every inch of glass, I could not quite share this con-
fidence that the hut was splinter-proof. But I
required that tea. It was very good tea. Had it
been shaving water, it would have gone cold at once.
But being tea which I wished to drink quickly, it
remained at boiling-point and declined to be mollified
with milk. However, no more H.E.? came our
way, only shrapnel.

McLeod said we had had at least two thousand
Turks against us and at least twelve guns. During
the action the enemy reinforced the position from his
main one at Harbe. He must have had other
casualties in addition to our prisoners. Our left
wing, when they occupied the hills, saw four or five
hundred Turks ‘ skirr away’ in one body, and the
machine-gunners found a target. Raiding-parties
of Arabs hung on our flanks throughout the day, and
increased the force against us, at any rate
numerically.

The day had been cloudy and comparatively
cool, and an exquisite evening crowned it. With

1 High explosive.

44 BELED

dusk I left the station, where wounded Turks were
groaning and shells bursting, and sought the hills.
The shrapnel was dying down, and, once off the
plain, all was quiet. The scene here was one of
great loveliness. The Dujail, a narrow canal from
the Tigris, ran swiftly with water of delightful cold-
ness and sweetness. The canal was fringed with
flowers, poppies, marguerites, and campions; the
innumerable folds and hollows were emerald-green.
C Company were holding the extreme left of our
picket-line. Here I found Hasted, Hall, Fisher,
and Charles Copeman. We held a dry, very deep
irrigation-canal, running at right angles to the
Dujail. There were no shells, and we could listen
composedly to the last of the shrapnel away on the
right. The full moon presently flooded the hills
with enchantment. But our night was broken by
Arab raids. Twice these robbers of the dead and
wounded tried to rush us. The first party prob-
ably escaped in the bushes, but the second suffered
casualties. In the evening Arabs had raided our
aid-post, wounding the attendant, who escaped with
difficulty. Fortunately there was none but dead
there ; these they stripped, cutting off one man’s
finger for the ring onit. All night long they prowled
the battlefield and dug up our buried dead. For
which, retribution came next day.

Fisher and I scraped a hole in our canal, and tried
to sleep. But a cold wind sneaked about the nulla,
and the hours dragged past with extreme discomfort.
No one had blanket or overcoat, and most were in
shorts. At dawn we had ten minutes’ notice to
rejoin the rest of the regiment behind the station.
In that ten minutes I had opportunity to admire

BELED + 45

the soldier-man’s resourcefulness. One of the picket, —
thrusting his hand deep into one of the countless
holes in our canal-wall, found two tiny eggs.
Raising fat in some fashion—probably a candle-end
—he had fried eggs for breakfast before we moved.
The eggs were presumed to be grouse-eggs. More
likely they were bee-eater’s, or may have been
snake’s or lizard’s. These canals are haunted by
huge monitors, and there must be tortoises in the
Dujail. However, eggs were found, and eggs were
eaten.

On picket the men’s talk was interesting to hear.
They were regardless of the discomfort they had
known so long ; and when his turn came to watch,
every man was eager to lend his waterproof sheet to
Fisher and me, who had only our thin khaki.
Marner’s death had gone deep. ‘I hear Mr. Marner’s
dead,’ said a voice. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said
another ; ‘he was a nice feller.” ‘He was a good
feller an’ a’,’ said a third. ‘He was more like a
brother to me than an officer,’ his platoon-sergeant
told me. These were brief tributes to an able and
conscientious man, but they sufficed. At Sumaik-
chah our bivvies had been side by side, where the
green was most glowing, and we had rejoiced
together in that light and colour.

Beled Station was a small action, scarcely bigger
than those dignified in the Boer War with the name
of battles. Our casualties were little over a hundred
for the whole day, and more than half of these were
incurred in the station itself. The Leicestershires
lost twenty, three killed among them; several of
the wounded died later. But the action attained
considerable fame locally as a model of a successful

46 BELED

little battle. Our losses were miraculously slight.
But for the very great skill with which the two
separate attacks were organized, and the constant
alertness which exploited every one of the ground’s
endless irregularities, our losses must have been
many times heavier. The advance was conducted
with caution and the utmost economy of life; but
the moment a breach was effected or an opportunity
offered, then there was a lightning blow and a swift
push forward. Thus the enemy in the station were
trapped before they realized that their retreat was
threatened. The careless trooping together at the
station was the one regrettable thing, and it cost us
dear. The water of Beled Station was like the
water brought to David from Bethlehem.

For the action itself, a small force advanced
steadily throughout the day, with unreliable maps,
over ten miles of broken country, which was
admirably furnished with posts of defence, which
posts they seized and turned into advantages for
attack. They captured a strong position and over
two hundred prisoners, three machine-guns, and
some hundreds of rifles with less than half the
casualties their numerically superior foe sustained.
Since a small battle is an epitome of a large one,
and far easier to see in detail, even this lengthy
account may have justification. The Army Com-
mander’s opinion was shown not alone by his
congratulatory message, but by the immediate
honours awarded. To the Leicestershires fell one
Military Cross and four Military Medals, one of
the latter going to Sergeant Batten, Marner’s
platoon-sergeant. The water-tank leans against

1 Westlake’s. See next chapter,

BELED 47

the station no longer, and they have repaired the
crumbled walls. But the cracks and fissures in
the great fort lift eloquent witness to the way
both armies desired it, and the quiet, beautiful
hills carry their scars also.

The rushing brook, the silken grass and pride
Of poppies burning red where Marner died,
Unchanged ! and in the station still, as then,
The water that was bought with blood of men.

Il
HARBE

Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.
King Henry V.

If I thought Hell was worse than Mesopotamia, I’d be a good
man.—Sayings of Fowke.

NEXT morning was one of leisure. The tIgth
Brigade took up our line, and we bivouacked before
the station. We fed and washed and slept. The
enemy put a few shells on to the 19th Brigade,
doing no damage, and when that Brigade pushed
on to Harbe he fell back on his strong lines at
Istabulat, another four miles. The rgth Brigade,
with only one or two men wounded, seized Harbe
and twenty-four railway-trucks, which were of
great assistance presently, when the mules drew
them along the track with ammunition for the
assault on Istabulat.

In the afternoon the 28th Brigade followed to
Harbe. The heat was considerable, but the journey
was short. Beyond the river plunging shells told
us that our troops were pushing up both banks of
the Tigris simultaneously.

The 21st Brigade took over Beled. With them
remained the Cherub, wielding for one day the
flaming sword of retribution. Arabs had desecrated
our graves, as they always did, and had stripped

48

HARBE 49

our dead. The Cherub put the bodies back and
dug several dummy graves. In these last he put
Mills bombs; removing the pin, he held each
bomb down as the earth was delicately piled over.
The deed called for great nerve; he could feel
the bomb quick to jump under his finger’s pressure.
Arabs watched impudently, sniping his party from
a few hundred yards away. Neither did they let
him get more than a quarter of a mile away, when
he had finished, before they flocked down. The
Cherub made his way to the station, and watched,
as a boy watches a bird-trap. The Arabs fell
to scooping out the soil badger-fashion with their
hands. There was an explosion, and the earth
shot up in a fountain of clods. The robbers ran,
but returned immediately and carried off two of
their number, casualties. Then they remained
to dig. Colonel Leslie, commanding the 21st
Brigade, had watched from Beled Station with
enthusiasm, and he now turned a machine-gun
on them. The Cherub, returning to the scene of
his labours, found that the Arabs had dug two feet
deeper than his original grave, breaking up the
stiff ground with their fingers. To these desperate
people a piece of cloth seemed cheap at the cost
of two dead or wounded.

From first to last nothing moved deeper anger
than their constant exhumation of our dead, and
murder, for robbery’s sake, of the wounded or
isolated. Major Harley, A.P.M. of Baghdad in
later days, learnt to admire the ability of the Arabs,
whose brief Golden Age, when Abbasids ruled, so
far outshone contemporary Europe. When he
pressed them on their ghoul-like ways, they replied,

D

50 HARBE

‘You British are so foolish. You bury the dead
with the clothes. The dead do not need clothes,
and we do.’ The logic of this does not carry far.
To them, as Mussulmans, graves were sacrosanct
to a unique degree; a suspicion of disrespect on
our part would rouse the whole of Islam to flaming
wrath. They were criminals, by their own ethos,
when they desecrated our dead. Moreover, they
murdered whenever they could, in the cruellest
and beastliest fashion. The marvel is, our actions
of reprisal were so rare. Apart from this of the
Cherub’s, only two came within my _ personal
knowledge. Of these two cases, one I and nearly
the whole division considered savage and unjustifi-
able, which was also the official view. It was the
act of a very young subaltern, mistakenly inter-
preting an order. In the other case an Arab was
caught red-handed, lurking in a ditch on our line
of march, with one of their loaded knobkerries
for any straggler. I do not know what happened,
but have no doubt that he was shot.

It cannot be said that they acted for patriotic
motives, as the Spanish guerrillas against Napoleon’s
troops. I remember an article? by Sir William
Willcocks dealing with his experiences before the
war, in which he tells how he and a friend went
ashore from a steamer on the Tigris. An Arab
calmly dropped on one knee and took aim at the
Englishmen, as if the latter were gazelles or part-
ridges. He missed, and they followed him into
his village, where they asked him why he had fired.
The man answered that he did it in self-defence,

1“Two and a Half Years in Mesopotamia,’ Blackwood’s Magazine:
March, 1916,

HARBE 51

for the others had fired first. ‘That,’ said the
Englishmen, ‘is impossible, for you see we are
unarmed.’ Hearing this, the village rushed on
them and robbed them of their valuables. Yet one
of them was an official high in Government service.

The other side of the shield, as it affected Brother
Buddu, was shown next day at Harbe. At dawn
three men and four women were found in the
middle of the 19th Brigade’s camp, outside General
Peebles’ tent, wailing. The women said their
husbands had been bayoneted and mutilated by
Turks a fortnight before, and buried here. This
story proved true. The women dug up and bore
off the decomposing fragments for decent burial.

The Buddu was an alien in his own land, loathed
and oppressed by the Turk. In his turn he robbed
and slew as chance offered. He pursued the chase
for the pelt, and went after human life as our more
civilized race go after buck.

About this time the Bishop of Nagpur was on
his second visit from India. His see was usually
mispronounced as Nankipoo. He was following us
up to consecrate the graves of our battlefields.
Great delight was given by the thought that West-
lake’s still unexploded bombs would receive conse-
cration also for any retributive work that awaited
them. And we brooded over the suggestion that
the good Bishop might find, even in Mesopotamia,
Elijah’s way to heaven, fiery-chariot-wise.

Our new camp was amid mounds and ruins.
We found green coins, pottery fragments, and
shells with very lovely mother-of-pearl. The
Dujail ran near by, and made a green streak through
an arid waste. The whole landscape seemed one

52 HARBE

dust-heap, sand and rubbish. But by the brook
were poppies, marguerites, delicate pink campions,
wheat and barley growing as weeds of former
cultivation, and thickets of blue-flowered liquorice.
There were many thorns, especially a squat shrub
with white papery globes. A large and particularly
fleshy broom-rape, recently flowering, festered
unpleasantly everywhere.

April was well on, and the sun gained power
daily. The camp had a thousand discomforts.
We lay under bivvies formed of a blanket, supported
on a rifle and held down uncertainly by stones.
Blinding dust-storms careered over the desert.
These djinns, with their whirling sand-robes, would
swoop down and whisk the poor shelters away.
If the courts above take note of blasphemy under
such provocation, the Recording Angel’s office
was hard worked these days. One would be
reading a letter, already wretched enough with
heat and flies, and suddenly you would be fighting
for breath and sight in a maelstrom of dirt, in-
describably filthy dirt, whilst your papers flew up
twenty feet and your rifle hit you cruelly over
the head. As a Marian martyr observed to an
enthusiast who thrust a blazing furze-bush into
his face, ‘ Friend, have I not harm enough? What
need of that?’ One storm at Harbe blew all night,
having made day intolerable and meals out of the
question. As Fowke curled himself miserably
under his blanket for the night, I heard him deliver
himself of the opinion quoted at the head of this
chapter.

Flies may be taken for granted. They swarm
in these vile relics of old habitation. Moreover,

HARBE 53

there had been a Turkish camp at hand. But
snakes and scorpions were found also almost hourly.
The snakes were small asps; the scorpions were
small also, but sufficiently painful. My batman
was consumed with curiosity as to what a scorpion
was like ; he had ‘ heard tell of them’ in Gallipoli.
The listening Gods took account of his desire, and
he was mildly stung the day we left.

We spent the best part of a fortnight at Harbe.
Morning and evening were enlivened by regular
hates. So we had to dig trenches. But there
were more memorable happenings at Harbe than
the discomforts. Hebden returned with stores
of sorts from Baghdad. Two new subalterns,
Sowter and Keely, came. On Tuesday Hall’s
M.C. for Sannaiyat was announced. We celebrated
this with grateful hymn far into night. Thursday
brought the Cherub’s M.C., another very popular
honour, and we sang again, and the mules from
their mess sang a chorus back, as before.

When as at dusk our Mess carouse,
With catches strong and brave,

The mules their tuneful hearts arouse,
And answer stave for stave.

“Dumb nature’ breaks in festive noise,
Remembering in this East

The mystic bond which knits the joys
Of righteous man and beast.

Then pass the flowing bowl about—
Our stores have come to-day—
And let the youngest captain shout,

And let the asses bray.

The thorny trudge awhile forget,
And foeman’s waiting host |
To-morrow bomb and bayonet—
To-night we keep the toast !

54 HARBE

These light-hearted evenings seemed, even then,
sacramental. We were waiting while the Third
Corps and the cavalry cleared the other bank of the
Tigris, level with us. On the 19th the river was
bridged at Sinijah, which made close touch between
the two corps possible and passage of men and guns.
About the same time the cavalry captured twelve
hundred and fifty Turks on the Shat-el-Adhaim.
Our wait was necessary. But we knew the enemy
was terribly entrenched less than six miles away,
and that our sternest fight since Sannaiyat was
preparing. ‘ This will be a full-dress affair, with
the corps artillery,’ I was told. Some of my
comrades were under twenty; others, like Fowke
and Grant-Anderson, were men of ripe age and
experience in many lands. But all had aged in
spirit. Hall, though his years were only nineteen,
had grown since Sannaiyat into a man, responsi-
bility touching his old gaiety with power. So we
waited on this beach of conflict.

One evening stands out by its beauty and un-
conscious greatness. Ithappenedthus. Remember
how young many were, and it is small wonder if
depression came at times. After the trying trench
warfare before Kut had come the rush to Baghdad,
a period of strain and tremendous effort. We
had been fighting and marching continuously
for many weeks, with every discomfort and over
a cursed monotonous plain, without even the
palliation of fairly regular mails. When men
have been ‘ going over the top ’ repeatedly, emerging
always with comrades gone, the nerves give way.
We longed to be at that Istabulat position. Yet
here we had to wait while Cailley’s Column fought

HARBE 28)

level with us, and day by day those sullen lines
were strengthening. We had barely six thousand
men to throw at them. So one night talk became
discontented, and some one wished some reinforce-
ment could be with us from the immense armies
which our papers bragged were being trained at
home. Then another—G. A. or Fowke—replied :

Oh that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day !

Swiftly that immortal scene, of the English spirit
facing great odds invincibly, followed, passage
racing after passage.

God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more!

It was an electric spark. I never heard poetry,
or literature at all, mentioned save this once. But
all were eager and speaking, for all had read
Henry V. When the lines were reached,

Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart,

laughter cleansed every spirit present of fear, and
the shadow of fear, misgiving. Nothing less grimly
humorous than the notion of such an offer being
made now, or of the alleged consequences of such
an offer, in the instant streaming away of all His
Majesty’s Forces in Mesopotamia, could have made
so complete a purgation. Comedy took upon
herself the office of Tragedy. When voices could
rise above the laughter, they went on:

56 HARBE

His passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.

‘Movement-orders down the line and ration-
indents,’ was the emendation.

We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

And Fowke’s voice towered to an ecstasy of sarcasm
as he assured his unbelieving hearers that

Gentlemen in England, now abed,
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.

As a Turkish attack was considered possible,
every morning we stood-to for that ‘ witching hour,’
immediately before dawn, which is usually selected
for ‘hopping the parapet.’ The brigades recon-
noitred, and exchanged shots with enemy pickets.
Fritz came, of course. Then the 19th Brigade
went on, and took up a position two miles in front
behind the Median Wall, of which more hereafter.
The battle preparations went busily forward.

Our camp was strewn with pebbles, an old shingle-
beach, for we were on the ancient edges of the sea,
before the river had built up Iraq.: The stones
at Beled had been the first signs that we were
off the alluvial plain. South of Baghdad it was
reported that a reward of {100 would be paid
(by whom I never heard) to the finder of any sort
of stone. And now, after our long sojourn in
stoneless lands, these pebbles were a temptation,
and there was a deal of surreptitious chucking-

1 South Mesopotamia; north is Jezireh.

HARBE 57

about. One watched with secret glee while a
smitten colleague pretended to be otherwise occupied,
but nevertheless kept cunning eyes searching for
the offender. I enjoyed myself best, for I lay and
watched the daily parade of the troops before break-
fast, and could inquire genially, ‘ Have you had a
good stand-to?’ Fowke asked the wastes in a
soaring falsetto, ‘ Why do the heathen rage?’ And
he was returned question for question, with ‘Why
do you keep laughing at me with those big, blue
eyes?’ Then the camp would rock with song as
we fell to shaving and, after, breakfast.

The superstitions which old experience had
justified waxed strong as the days went by. When
McInerney marked out a quoits-court and Charles
Copeman dug a mess—these officers found their
amusement in singular ways, and would have
been hurt had any one attempted to usurp their
self-appointed duties—and when I put in services
for Sunday, the 22nd, it was recognized that we
should march, and fight on the Sabbath. Not
more anxiously did the legionary listen for tales
of supernatural fires in the corn and of statues
sweating blood than the regiments asked each
other, ‘ Have you dug a mess yet? Has the padre
put in services?’ Two of us went down with
colitis—possibly the Sumaikchah waters were not
even yet done with—and Fowke, as they left us,
profaned Royal Harry’s words:

He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart.

For all this, Shakespeare had a share in the
storming of Istabulat, as will be seen; as the ghost

58 HARBE

of Bishop Adhemar, who had died at Antioch,
was said to have gone before Godfrey of Boulogne’s
scaling-ladder when the Crusaders took Jerusalem.
(‘Thank God!’ said they. ‘ He was not frustrate
of his vows.’)

On Friday rain came, and Charles Copeman,
who had, as already indicated, a passion for digging
—caught, perchance, in boyhood from his father’s
sexton—dug a funk-hole from the enemy shell-fire.
McInerney helped him. Now this was not an
ordinary funk-hole. It was a very splendid and
elaborate hole, and no one was allowed to come
near, lest he cause its perfection to crumble away.
So, to dry ourselves after the rain, we all dug, and
the Desert-Gods laughed in their bitter little minds
as they saw. Among the rest, Sowter and I dug
a hole, dug deeply, widely, with much laughter
and joyfulness. And to us, as the afternoon wore
towards evening, came the C.O., and, after watching
us for a few minutes, told us that we marched in
an hour.

Ill
THE FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT

These men, the steadfast among spears, dying, won for them-
selves a crown of glory that fadeth not away.—Greek Anthology.

IN the quiet light we crossed the railway, and moved
up to the Median Wall, in all a march of perhaps a
mile and a half. This wall was old in Xenophon’s
time; and along its northern side his army moved,
watching, and watched by, the troops of Tissa-
phernes, moving parallel on the other side. He
speaks of it as twenty feet in breadth and one
hundred feet in height. Once it was the border
between Assyria and Babylonia, and must have
stretched to the Euphrates. Even now it runs
from the Tigris far into the desert. It has crumbled
to one-third of the height given by Xenophon.
The semblance of a wall no longer, it is a mighty
flank of earth, covering tiers of bricks. It effectr-
ally hid our movements as we crossed the plain
before it. The Turk was shrapnelling the wall
and its approaches, endeavouring to reply to some
howitzers. These last we left on our nght. As I
happened to be the nearest officer, the major came
up and asked me that the Leicestershires should
move more to the left, in case any of his guns had
a premature.

We fell silently into our places behind the wall.

1 Anabasis, Book ii.
39

60 FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT

The artillery behind us were favoured with a certain
amount of zizyph-scrub ; but the wall furnished no
cover but itself. Fowke, who at all times indulged in
a great deal of gloomy prognostication, known as
‘Fowke-lore,’ and received with delight, but not
quite implicit belief, foretold that on the morrow
our cavalry—it was a point of principle with the
infantry to assume that the cavalry, as well as
all Higher Commands, were capable of every
stupidity and of nothing but stupidity—would cut
up B Company, his own, who had a certain un-
attractive duty assigned to them on the extreme
left. He also told us that the Median Wall would be
shelled to blazes, which seemed pretty probable.
The clearest figure in my memory for this hurried,
stealthy evening is J. Y. Copeman, cousin of Charles.
‘J. Y.’—for he never carried any graver appellation
than mere initials—once a rising lawyer in Van-
couver, was now our quartermaster. The gayest
and most debonair figure in the division, known and
popular everywhere, he was also an incredibly
efficient quartermaster. Possibly the same qualities
make for success in law and quartermastering. His
gaiety was the mask for a most unsleeping energy
and very great ability. He was once dubbed, by
a person more alliterative than observant, ‘a frail,
flitting figure with a fly-flap.’ Yet he had taken
over Brodie’s job, at Sannaiyat, when that ex-
perienced ‘ quarter’ had wakened suddenly to find
that an aeroplane bomb had wounded him Within
a year of this event I was privileged to be present
at an argumeut between our D.A.D.O.S. and our
D.A.D.S. & T.,! as to whether Copeman or Jock

1 The Divisional Heads of Ordnance and Supply and Transport.
f

Pikst DALTLE OF ISTABULAT 6x

Reid, of the Seaforths, was the greater quarter-
master. Where two such authorities failed to come
to a decision, I must stand aside, especially as both
J. Y. and Reid are my friends. With his ability
J. Y. had an indomitable resolve, which made him
refuse to go sick. He carried on through months
of constant ill-health ; sometimes he was borne on
one of his own ration-carts, too unwell to walk or ride.
He fed alone, but had a familiar, in the shape of a
ridiculously clever and most selfish cat. And it is
J. Y. whom I remember on this eve of Istabul at—
J. Y. marshalling his carts swiftly and silently up
to the wall when darkness had fallen, and J. Y.
next morning scurrying them away before dawn.

A Company went on picket, B and C patrolled
before our lines, D lay behind the wall. Fires were
kept low. J. Y. got our blankets up to us, and we
had some sleep.

Next day, the 21st, all kit was packed and on the
carts by 4a.m. Breakfast was at 3.30; hot tea and
a slice of bacon. The second line fell back. Then
we clung to the wall, and waited ; all but Fowke.
That warrior moved off to the left with part of B
Company, all carrying spades. Their task was to
come out of the shelter of the wall as soon as the
action began, and to work their spades frantically,
sending up such dust-clouds that the bemused Turk
might suppose a new Army Corps advancing to
attack his right, and take steps accordingly. The
brown-coated figure took a sombre farewell of me,
reminding us that, though his crowd were going to
be cut up by our own cavalry, the rest of us would
be shelled into annihilation when Johnny opened
on the famous wall. ‘He’s bound to have the

62 FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT

exact range, for it’s such a landmark. Besides,
he’s got German archaeologists with him, who’ve dug
here for years and years; they know every brick.
And he’s been practising on it for weeks. You saw
how he had it last night when we came up.’

The two actions which it is customary to call the
two Battles of Istabulat were fought in positions
some milesapart. The title of Istabulat, or of Dujail
River, may fitly be reserved for the first action. The
action of the 22nd may then be known as that of
Istabulat Mounds. The Istabulat fight was one in
which my own Brigade were spectators, except for
isolated and piece-meal action. We were in re-
serve ; and the 8th Brigade, of the 3rd Division,
were in support, in line with us, and behind the
Median Wall. The enemy were trying a new
bowler, Shefket Pasha being in command, vice
Kazim Karabekir Bey, who had resigned from com-
mand of their Eighteenth Corps just before Baghdad
fell. We should not have supposed that this made
any difference, even had we known.

The Istabulat battle has been described in print,*
though inadequately and, in one important respect,
most unfairly. That unfairness I shall correct in the
next chapter. But for this first action J do not pro-
pose to do more than give an outline of the work of
the two Brigades engaged, and an account of our own
part in reserve.

The enemy’s position was of immense strength.
Old mounds made an upraised plateau, through
which the Dujail Canal ran swiftly between steep
and lofty banks. The 19th and 21st Brigades

1*The Battle that Won Samarrah,’ by Brigadier-General A. G.
Wauchope, C.M.G., D.S.O. ; Blackwood’s, April, 1918.

Phobia OF ISTABULAT 63

attacked in converging columns, the first thrusting
right in, the second coming with an arm sweep round.
Thus, both frontal and flank attacks were provided.
The enemy’s position was so strong, his redoubts so
lofty, and the whole formidable terrain had been
so entrenched and wired round that I do not believe
we hoped to do more than eat our way into a part
of his line. The operation was magnificent bluff.
His morale was calculated to be now so low that he
was likely to evacuate the position if we bit deeply
into it. If this view is correct, General Maude was
taking a heavyrisk. But he not only always made
all preparation possible before he struck, but on
occasion did not hesitate to strike where the odds
should have been against success, but the prize
of success was great, and the morale of the troops
against him weakened by repeated blows. In the
Jebel Hamrin his calculation failed. But at Istab-
ulat it succeeded. But, had the Turk been as he
was in Sannaiyat days, two months back, we should
have had a week of dreadful fighting instead of one
bloody day. Holding Istabulat heights was a force
estimated at seven thousand four hundred infantry
and five hundred sabres, with thirty-two guns.
This force, in its perfect position, we attacked with
two weak brigades.

The carts had scuttled away; J. Y. and his cat
had stalked off through the dimness. We were
shivering behind the wall. At 5 a.m. the bombard-
ment opened. From five to seven we brought
every gun to bear on the enemy. Istabulat, like
the last of Sannaiyat’s five battles, was an artillery
battle, in the sense that the infantry, less strongly
and splendidly supported, would have been helpless.

64 FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT

‘Tll never say a word against the gunners again
after to-day and Sannaiyat,’ said a wounded Sea-
forths’ officer to me in the evening. The field-guns
were well up from the start, and the ‘ hows’ soon
advanced. When the action began, the latter were
half-a-mile behind us at the wall. It was an im-
pressive sight, the smoke rushing out with each dis-
charge, and then swaying back with the gun’s recoil.
But the guns were rarely stationary long, and we
soon had the unwonted experience of finding ourselves
well behind our own artillery. Finally, in places our
batteries were firing at almost point-blank range ;
the enemy was simply blasted out of his trenches.

Fowke’s dust-up drew a few shells ; and the Turk
strengthened his right to meet this new threat,
But presently Fritz came over, very low and very
impudent. He reported that it was only Fowke,and
sheered off with a contempt quite visible from the
ground. He was so low that we fired at him with
rifles, vainly; then he went, and was swooping
down on the Seaforths’ attack and machine-gun-
ning it.

The 19th Brigade got their first objectives with
very few casualties. But then the enemy poured a
murderous fire on to them from every sort of weapon.
The 21st Brigade all but accomplished their impos-
sible task. At a critical point a terrible misfortune
occurred. The gth Bhopals—who were playfully
and better known as the gth ‘ Bo-Peeps ’"—crossed
in front of a strong machine-gun position instead
of outflanking it. The Turks held their fire till the
regiment was close up. The latter lost two hundred
men in three minutes ; and a large body of Turks.
who were wavering on the edge of surrender, fell

PERSPEATILE OF ISTABULAT 65

back instead. The Bhopals never recovered from
this disaster. The skeleton of a battalion which
survived the fight was sent down the line, and its
place taken by the 1st Guides from India.

Two other battalions of the 21st Brigade, the znd
Black Watch and the 1/8th Gurkhas, crossed a plain
bare of cover. They crossed at terrible cost, and
scaled the all but sheer walls of the Turkish left.
But it was too much; and a counter-attack swept
the survivors off, and took two officers and several
men prisoners. Evening found our forces held,
though the whole enemy front line was ours and
our teeth were fixed deeply into the position. The
Black Watch had lost all four company commanders,
killed.

It is not possible to convey to paper the heroism
and agony of thisday. Mackenzie, of the Seaforths,
who won the D.S.O. two months previously at
Sannaiyat for valour which in any previous war
would have won the V.C., was shot dead as he was
offering his water-bottle to a wounded Turk. Irvine,
of the 9th Bhopals, was wounded, and lay out all
day ; two wounded Turks looked after him, sur-
rendering when we ultimately came up. The
Gurkhas and Bhopals took two hundred and thirty
prisoners. A Black Watch private captured nine
Turks and brought them in, himself supporting the
last of the file, who was wounded. A machine-
gunner, isolated when his comrades were killed or
driven back, although wounded, worked his gun
till we advanced again.

The artillery, as was inevitable from the rdle they
filled, suffered. Major the Earl of Suffolk, com-
manding B/56th Battery, was killed by shrapnel

E

66 FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT

through the heart. He was a popular, unassuming
man. Lieutenant Stewart, of the same battery,
was wounded. Colonel Cotter, commanding the
56th Brigade, R.F.A., was hit in the fore-
head. Lieutenant Hart’s wrist was shot through.
The 14th Battery had two hundred 5.9’s burst round
them; yet they brought up their team, one by one,
and got the guns away, losing men, but no animals.

Meanwhile from the Median Wall the ‘ Tigers ’*
watched the fight. One could not help being
reminded of the grand-stand at a football match.
Sitting on the further side and below the crest, the
officers watched the Indians pushing over the plain
steadily through heavy shelling. We saw dreadful
pounding away on our left, where 5.9’s plunged and
burst among the trenches the Seaforths were holding.
Yet even a battle grows monotonous; so in the
afternoon we went down to the trenches before the
wall to rest, so far as heat and flies would permit.
In that period of slackness a number of men swarmed
up the wall. Instead of sitting where we had done,
they sat on the crest, against the sky-line. Hitherto
the shrapnel had not come nearer than a ridge four
hundred yards away, which had been often and well
peppered. But now came the hateful whistle, and
the ridge was swept from end to end with both H.E.
and shrapnel. In our trenches we were spattered
with pebbles. Thorpe, next to me, got a piece of
H.E. in his coat. But we escaped a direct hit. One
shell passing overhead skimmed the ridge and burst
on the other side, scattering Colonel Knatchbull’s
kit and smashing his fishing-rod. It killed a groom

1The Leicestershires’ badge is a tiger, commemorating service in
India a century ago.

PIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT 67

and wounded three other men, and wounded three
horses so badly that they all had to be killed. It is
always men on duty, holding horses or otherwise
unable to escape, who pay for the curiosity of the idle.

Firing continued very heavy till dusk. In the
evening I buried the man killed by the shell, and then
went back to find the clearing-station. Part of a
padre’s recognized function is to cull and purvey
news. And [had many friends engaged. A couple
of miles back Ifound the 7th British Field Ambulance,
to which my own chief, A. E. Knott, was attached.
The sight here was far more nerve-racking than
a battlefield. It was an open human shambles,
with miserable men lying about, some waiting on
tables to be operated on. Knott was about to help
in amputating a leg. In the few words I had with
him I learnt that Suffolk was killed. I think Iam
right when Isay that he was the only man killed among
our 7th Division gunners. (We had other artillery
with us, and they lost heavily.) It seemed strangely
mediaeval, as from the days of Agincourt or Cregi,
that Death, scarring so many, but forbearing to
exact their uttermost, should strike down so great
a name and one that is written on so many pages of
our history. I knew well how many would mourn
the man. Jasked Knott the question of questions,
‘What are our casualties?’ These, one knew,
must be heavy; but I was appalled by his reply,
‘Sixteen hundred to one o’clock.’

I left the wretched scene and werit back. Part
of the way McLeod, of the Seaforths, his right arm
in a sling, wandered with me, talking dazedly of the
day and its fortunes. J found an officer with whom
Thad travelled on a river-boat not long before, when

68 FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT

his mind held the presentiment of death in his first
action. He, like McLeod, went out from Istabulat
with the card, ‘G.S.+ wound, right arm.’ So much
for presentiment in some cases. A different case
occurred next day.

I found my mess sitting down to dinner.
‘Montag’ Warren, our P.M.C., had excellently
acquired dates and white mulberries, which last
made a stew, poorly tasting, but a change from long
monotony. A clamour greeted me. ‘ Where’ve
you been, padre? What’sthenews?’ Itoldthem
we had got on well. Then some one asked, ‘But
what did you hear about our casualties?’ Minds
were tense, for every one knew that next day our
brigade must take up the attack, and for a whole
day we had seen Hell in full eruption on our right.
I told them other things I had learnt—told them
anything that might brush aside the awkward ques-
tion. But they demanded to know. Neither do
I see how I could have avoided telling. So at last
I said, ‘ Well, what I was told was sixteen hundred.’

Silence fell. To some, sixteen hundred may seem
a butcher’s bill so trifling that brave men—and these
were men superlatively brave, officers of the 17th
Foot, and some of them had seen more pitched
battles than years, had known Ypres and Loos and
Neuve Chapelle, Gallipoli and Sheikh Saad—would
not concede it a momentary blanching of the cheek.
But these sixteen hundred casualties were out of
barely four thousand men engaged, including gunners.
In that minute each man communed with his own
spirit,

Voyaging through strange fields of thought alone.

1 Gun-shot,

FIRST BATTLE OF ISTABULAT 69

The reader will be wearyof Henry V. Nevertheless
Shakespeare came to the aid of us, his countrymen,
again as gallant old Fowke quoted from the heart
and brain of England:

He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart. . ..

We would not die in that man’s company,
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

So laughter ended a terrible day. Next day our
tiny band was the spearhead of a handful of fifteen
hundred bayonets, who caught the Turk in his fast-
nesses, wrested guns and prisoners from him, and
slew and broke his forces so that they recoiled for
thirty miles.

There was no rest. Through the darkness J. Y.
flitted to and fro, and here and there a spectral blaze
flickered furtively. We had neither blankets nor
greatcoats, for fear of shell-fire made it impossible
to bring the carts up. The night was infernal with
cold; sand-flies rose in myriads from the ground ;
we shivered and itched in our shorts. Old aches
and pains found me out, rheumatism and troubles
of a tropical climate. I lay between two men, both
of whom had seen their last sunset; one was
Sergeant-Major Whatsize. Infinitely far off seemed
peace and the time, as Grant-Anderson expressed
tt;

When the Gurkhas cease from gurkhing, and
the Sikhs are sick no more.

At midnight came a roar, then a crashing. It was
Johnny blowing up Istabulat Station. At three
o’clock we were aroused.

IV
THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

Salute the sacred dead,
Who went and who return not.
J. R. Lowe xv.

Day was welcome, for it brought movement, though
movement harassed by cold and then by heat and
ever-increasing clouds of flies. We snatched our
mugs of tea, our bread and bacon. At 3.30 we
moved off. We marched behind the wall, then
crossed the Dujail, and pushed towards the left
flank of the enemy’s position. Vast clouds of white
dust shut us close from any knowledge as we climbed
up a narrow pass. Fortunately the light was hardly
even dim yet.

We dropped into a plain, and saw the Hero’s
Way by which the others had gone. Dead Gurkhas
and Highlanders lay everywhere. I have always
felt that the sight of a dead Highlander touches
even deeper springs of pathos than the sight of any
other corpse. Analysed, the feeling comes to this,
I think : in his kilt he seems so obviously a peasant,
lying murdered on the breast of the Universal
Mother.

So we marvelled as we saw the way and the way’s
price—marvelled that any could have survived to
that stiff, towering redoubt, with its moat of trenches
and the trenches ringing its sides; and marvelled

70

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA OE

most of all that any should have scaled its top,
though for a moment only. These trenches held
abundant dead, Turks and ourown. On the reverse
slope I came on rows of the enemy, huddled on their
knees, their hands lifted to shield their heads from
the shrapnel which had killed them. Below ran
Dujail in its steep ditch; inland the plateau rose,
against which the roth Brigade had surged.

For once the Turk’s retreat had been precipitate.
That master of rearguard warfare had meant to
stand here, to save railhead and all its rolling-stock.
His dead were more than ours ; and all our way was
strewn with débris. Candles and cones of sugar
were in plenty, ammunition, blankets—for Johnny
had not been cold, as we had—bivvies, clothes,
slippers. I carried an ammunition-box a few miles,
thinking it would make a good letter-case.

The enemy had gone. Before passing to tell of
this new day’s battle I quote, from Hasted’s?
account, a description of Istabulat lines:

The Turks intended to spend the summer there ;
they did not contemplate an attack before the hot
weather set in. Three well-concealed lines of trenches
had been prepared, on small hills and amongst deep
nullas, with the water-supply of the Dujail running
through the centre. Advanced redoubts and strong
points made the defences formidable.

The brigade formed up about 6.30 a.m., the 53rd
Sikhs coming in from picket on the extreme right.
We passed the 56th Brigade, R.F.A., whose officers
eagerly came with us a short distance, telling us of
the previous day. We halted for breakfast.

1 A lecture delivered by him at Rawal Pindi, Indiaj See Preface,

Turkush |

he

he os sie Si

ze we Scand es
sa ee

Sober. Rc files
hh,

Rurns of

[Cavalry
/

/

BATTLES SCF ISTABYLLAT mMounes I

Ne TTI”

=
rome TN”

.cerarnves

“Me FOSITION AT MOON APRIL 22nd

74 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

Verbal orders came from Division. They were
just ‘ Push on vigorously.’ With it was coupled an
assurance that there was nothing against us, that
the enemy was fleeing, thoroughly demoralized.

We moved on. From across the Tigris guns
boomed steadily. Distant glimpses of river showed
shoals, islands, spaces green with cultivation. An
enemy plane, reconnoitring, was shot down, and
pilot and observer killed. This incident had an
important influence on the battle which followed.
Even at this stage of the campaign, we fought in
Mesopotamia, both sides, with the most exiguous
number of planes. The Turks having lost their
best machine and pilot, our old friend Fritz, feared
to risk another. Hence, when the mounds of the
ancient city of Istabulat lay across our front, the
hostile observation was from the ground in front
and from our left flank only. And we were
enabled to pass through a depression, whilst his fire
went overhead, and so into the mounds.

We passed a 5.9 disabled by a direct hit and nearly
buried. The bare country was cracked with nullas,
some of them deep. Then we opened into
artillery formation, and entered utter desert. In
front were innumerable mounds, a dead town of long
ago. We went warily, with that quiet expectation,
almost the hardest of all experiences to endure, of
the first shell’s coming. The official message was
that the enemy was incapable of serious opposition.
But of this the rank and file knew nothing; had
they known, old experience would have made them
sceptical. Fowke’s view, that all would prove to be
for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds and
arrangements, was the reigning philosophy. An

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 75

adapted edition of Schopenhauer would have sold
well in the mess (or anywhere in Mesopotamia).
Novelists speak of the hero being conscious that
eyes, in the forest or in his room at night (as may be),
are watching, watching. This knowledge governs
the feeling of ‘ going in artillery formation,’ with the
added knowledge that, though in broad sun, you
cannot hope to see your foe, who is certain to spring
on you, and merely waits till you are well under fire.

The bolt fell. About 9 a.m. a double report was
heard; then the Cherub sent back word, ‘ Four
enemy snipers retiring.’ By 9.30 firing was heavy.
The Cherub was wounded, and his two scouts killed.
The enemy was invisible, and mirage made ranging
impossible. The ground four hundred yards away
was a fairyland that danced and glimmered. When
a target was perceived, of Turks racing back, the
orders for fire were changed quickly, from ‘ Three
hundred yards’ to ‘fourteen hundred yards.’
Very vainly. This mirage continued throughout
the fight. Ahead was what we called the ‘ Second
Median Wall,’ a crumbled wall some twenty feet
high, which ran across the front of the mounds. To
its extreme left, our right, and in front of this wall,
was the Turkish police-post of Istabulat, by which
the battle was presently to be raging.

In those mounds the enemy had excellent cover.
Our leading company followed the scouts, and
took possession of the ruins. The ‘ Tigers’ were
arranged in four lines, according to companies, with
less than three hundred yards between the lines.
Dropping bullets fell fast, especially in the rear lines.
About Io a.m. two shells burst about a hundred
yards in front of Wilson and myself. Then Hell

76 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

opened all her mouths and spat atus. The battalion
lay down and waited. Twelve- pounder ‘ pip-
squeaks’ came in abundance, with a sprinkling
of heavier stuff. Many soldiers prefer the latter.
You can hear a 5.9 coming, and it gives you time to
collect yourself, and thus perhaps escape giving others
the trouble to collect whatis left of you. Iremember
once hearing General Peebles say that in his long ex-
perience of many wars he had known only three men
absolutely devoid of fear, ‘ Smith and Brown and—
Jones’ (mentioning a notorious and most-admired
fire-eating brigadier, a little man in whom bursting
shells produced every symptom of intoxication
except inability to get about). Then he added,
“Tm not sure about Jones.’

It is interesting to notice the different ways in
which nervousness shows. I remember one man in
whom was never observed the slightest emotion
amid the terriblest happenings, till one day some
one noticed that whenever he went forward he
turned up his jacket-collar, as if to shelter from that
fiery rain. Myself, I hate the beginning of conflict,
and am eager to push well into it and under the
shell-barrage. As there is said to be a cool core in
the heart of flame, so there is a certain cool centre
for the spirit where horror is radiating out to a wide
circumference. In the depths one must surrender
one’s efforts and trust to elemental powers and
agonies, but in the shallows all the calls are on the
“transitory being’ whose flesh and blood are pitted
against machinery. How can the nerves and tremb-
ling thought bear up? Yet they have borne up,
even in men quick with sense and imagination. I
felt restless as we lay on the flat desert listening to

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 97

the bullets singing by or to a nosecap’s leisured
search for a victim, dipping and twisting to left and
right till at last it thudded down. If one must lie
still, then company gives a feeling of security. Fate
may have, doubtless has, a special down on you, but
even Fate is unlikely to blow you to bits if the act
involves blowing to bits several of her more favoured
sons. So I remember with amusement my vague
vexation with the curiosity that always made my
companion get up and stroll about when under
fire, peering round. Though he went scarcely
five yards, it seemed like desertion.

We watched our guns run up to the ‘ Pimple,’
a recently built-up mound slightly ahead of us, lately
used as a Turkish O. Pip, now accruing to us for the
same purpose. The infantry assumed that these
wagons and limbers moving a hundred yards to our
right would draw all the enemy’s fire, in which case
we, helpless on the flat, would be shelled out of this
existence. But this did not happen; why, I cannot
guess, unless I have correctly traced the reason for
that bad observation so marked in the Turkish
gunning all through this day. We were in the
slightest possible depression, with a scarcely percep-
tible lift on our left and a steady rise before. Shells
plunged incessantly down our left, and went whist-
ling far beyond us. But comparatively few burst
among us ; and the shrapnel burst far too high to do
damage.

Our batteries were in position at the ‘ Pimple.’
We rose, marched through a tornado of noise, right-
turned, and went across the muzzle of our own guns,
also in full blast. In front I saw lines of Leicester-
shires scaling the slope and melting into the mounds.

78 * THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

My diary notes : ‘ Men’s delight to see river.’ We
came suddenly upon Brother Tigris, basking in
beautiful sunlight, becalmed in bays beneath lofty
bluffs. In this dreadful land water meant every-
thing ; we had had experiences of thirst, not to be
effaced ina lifetime. Away from the river men grew
uneasy. The river meant abundance to drink,
and bathing ; everywhere else water was bad, or the
supply precarious. We had been away from the
river since that night opposite Sindiyeh. So not
the crashing shells, the ‘ pipsqueaks ’ ripping the air
like dried paper, nor the bullets pinging by, pre-
vented men from greeting so deara sight. Standing
on the beach of imminent strife, in act to plunge, men
cried, ‘The Tigress, the Tigress!’ Instantly a scene
flashed back to memory from the book so often near
to thought in these days: how Xenophon, weary
and anxious with the restlessness and depression of
his much-tried troops, heard a clamour from those
who had reached a hill-crest, and, riding swiftly up
to take measures against the expected peril, found
them shouting ‘ Thalatta, Thalatta.’ Seafaring folk,
the most of them, they had caught, far below, their
first glimpse of the Euxine, truly a hospitable water
to them, since it could bear them home.

Wilson dressed his first wounded in sheltered,
broken ground, high above the river. The peaceful
beauty of the place is with me still. Above the
blue, unruffled pools green flycatchers darted, and
rollers spread metallic wings. The left bank lay low
and very lovely with flowers and fields. ‘I will
answer you,’ said Sir Walter Raleigh, asked his
opinion of a glass of wine, given as he went to execu-
tion, ‘as the man did who was going to Tyburn.

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 79

“ This is a good drink, if a man might but tarry by
it.”’’ Wilson left me here with Dobson ; but almost
immediately he sent back asking us to rejoin him.
Our few cases, all walking ones, remained in this
shelter till such time as they could fall back, and
Dobson and I crossed into the mounds.

It was nearly eleven o’clock. Our leading com-
pany had advanced by rushes to a distance of a
hundred and fifty yards beyond the Second Median
Wall. They were within three hundred yards of the
main enemy trenches. Battalion Head Quarters
was at the wall, the 56th Rifles were to the left, the
two Sikh regiments a quarter of a mile to the rear.
Machine-gun sections were at the wall, supporting
the forward regiments. The 56th Brigade, R.F.A.,
had moved up, and were firing close behind Wilson’s
new aid-post. Presently two more companies of
Leicestershires were sent beyond the wall, the
third in response to a message that the front line
had suffered heavily and were short of ammunition.
Before the final assault, then, the Leicestershires’
line, from the east inland, was D, A, B, these three
companies in this order.

But I am anticipating.

Wilson’s A.P. was in a dwarf amphitheatre, and
was filling up fast. Bullets were zipping over from
left and front. The enemy position rested on river
and railway, a half-dug position which some six
thousand men were frantically completing when we
caught them. Away beyond Tigris glittered the
golden dome of Samarra mosque; Samarra town
and Samarra station, like Baghdad town and
station, are on opposite banks of the river. The
station was railhead for this finished lower line of

80 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

eighty miles, and in it were the engines and rolling-
stock which had been steadily withdrawn before our
advance. Beyond the mounds the ground dropped
and stretched, level but broken, swept by machine-
gun and rifle, torn with shell and shrapnel, away to
Al-Ajik, against Samarra town. Here the Turk
resisted savagely. He was ranging onthe wall, which
was an extremely unhealthy spot, particularly in its
gaps, and he enfiladed the mounds from the railway.
We flung our fifteen hundred bayonets and our man-
iple of cavalry at the position. The one British
regiment, the Leicestershires, went in three hundred
and thirty strong, and lost a hundred and twenty-
eight men.

Dropping bullets took toll even before we left the
mounds. As I came up to join Wilson a man was
carried past. It was Major Adams, acting second-
in-command of the 53rd Sikhs. He had gone ahead
of his battalion to the wall, where a bullet struck
him in the forehead. He died within fifteen minutes,
and was unconscious as he went past me. No man
in the brigade was more beloved. He was always
first to offer hospitality. It was he who met our
mess when they first reached Sumaikchah and
invited them to come tohis ownfor lunch. I never
saw him but with a smile of infinite kindliness on
his face, and I saw him very often.

Face swift to welcome, kindling eyes whose light
Saw all as friends, we shall not meet again !

Here in the aid-post sat the Cherub, struck at last,
a flesh-wound in his thigh ; with many others. Next
to him was Charles Copeman, unwounded, waiting
to go forward with his bombers. Presently came

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 8I

Warren, bright and jaunty as a bird, and carrying
his left arm. ‘I’m all right,’ said Montag, ‘ got a
cushy one here.’ On his heels came G.A. ; his face
was that of a man fresh from the Beatific Vision.
Much later, when I had managed to get transport to
push him away, Iasked him, ‘ Got your stick, G.A. ?’
This was a stout stave on which he had carved,
patiently and skilfully, his name, ‘H. T. Grant-
Anderson,’ and a fierce and able-looking tiger at the
top, then his regiment, then curving round it the
names of the actions in which it had supported him :
Sannaiyat, Iron Bridge, Mushaidie, Beled Station;
while down the line now he was to add Jstabulat-
Samarra. This famed work of art he flaunted
triumphantly as he climbed into the ambulance.

But with these, and before some of them, came
very heavy news. By that fatal wall and on the
bullet-swept space before it died many of our
bravest. Hall, M.C., aged nineteen, who looked
like Kipling’s Afridi :

He trod the ling like a buck in spring, and he looked like a lance
in rest;

Hall fell, facing the finish of our journey and those
bright domes of Samarra, already gilded from the
sloping sun. His death was merciful, a bullet
through the heart ; ‘and sorrow came, not to him,
but to those who loved him.’

The theory was strongly held in the Leicester-
shires that the only way was to advance steadily.
This weakened the enemy’s morale, and, further,
he had no chance to pick out his ranges accurately.
To this theory and practice of theirs they put down
the fact that, though in the forefront of all their

F

82 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

battles, their losses were often so much slighter than
those of units that had acted more cautiously. I
quote again from Hasted’s brilliant lecture on the
battle :

There was no hesitation about the advance. Rushes
were never more than twenty yards, more often ten to
fifteen yards, as hard as one could go, and as flat as one
could lie, at the end of it. The theory, ‘the best way
of supporting a neighbouring unit is to advance,’ was
explained at once. The attention of the enemy’s
rifles and machine-guns was naturally directed to the
platoon or section advancing, even when they had
completed their rush. Directly one saw a party getting
slated, one took advantage of it to advance oneself,
in turn drawing fire, but taking care to finish the rush
before being properly ranged on. One seldom halted
long enough to open covering-fire, and besides, there
was nothing to fire at. Despite the very short halt,
it is no exaggeration to say that I have seen men go to
sleep between the rushes.

Shell-bursts provided excellent cover to advance
behind. Individuals, such as runners, adopted a zigzag
course with success; we lost very few. Platoons and
companies got mixed, but it was not difficult to retell
off. Perhaps control was easier owing to very little
rifle-fire from our side and the majority of enemy shells
landing on the supports. There was no question of men
taking insufficient cover; they melted into the sand
after five minutes with an entrenching tool, and during
the actual advance they instinctively took advantage
of every depression. Officers had no wish to stand up
and direct ; signallers lay flat with telephones. Stretcher-
bearers did not attempt to work in front of the wall.
Lewis-gunners suffered ; they carried gun and ammuni-
tion on the march (there were no mules), and the men
were tired ; their rushes were not so fast as the platoon
advances.

ToG.A., lying waiting, before he was hit, came up his

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 83

sergeant and said, ‘ That’s Mr. Hall over there, sir.
I can see him lying dead.’ But G. A. had thoughts
which pressed out even grief for his dead friend.
‘TI shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.’
Shakespeare might have added these men to those
Time stood still withal. For over four hours they
lay, within three hundred yards of their invisible foe,
under the sleet of bullets. McInerney told me
afterwards that it was the heaviest rifle-fire he had
known, except the Wadi. The Wadi was the one
which made the deepest impression of horror, of all
those dreadful and useless slaughters in Aylmer’s
and Gorringe’s attempt to relieve Kut—made this
impression, that is, so far as (to paraphrase Macaulay)
there 7s a more or less in extreme horror. And
McInerney had seen the 1915 fighting in Flanders.
Fortunately the enemy kept most of his shells for
farther back. We got plenty in the ruins. But by
far the greatest number went far back, where he
supposed our reinforcements were coming up. All
afternoon we worked in the aid-post under a roof of
shells, screaming in both directions, from the enemy
and from our own guns. In front the enemy watched
the ground so closely that G.A. got his wound by
the accident of raising his elbow. But now, as it
drew towards noon, there was a clatter as of old iron
behind him, and Service, the machine-gunner,
rushed up and erected his tripod and lethal toy. No
man was more popular than Service in normal times.
But to-day he and all his tribe stirred the bitter
enmity that Ian Hay tells us the trench-mortar
people aroused in France. ‘Go away, Service,’
his friends entreated. But Service stayed, a

1 Action of January 13, 1916.

84 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

fact which precipitated G.A.’s next short rush
forward.

On the left the three Indian battalions did a
holding attack, pushing out from the wall. They
lost heavily. The 53rd Sikhs lost their Colonel
(Grattan), their second-in-command (Adams), their
adjutant (Blewitt), their quartermaster (Scarth), all
killed or died of wounds. The last-named, a very
gallant and lovable boy, died in my own aid-post,
which he reached after nightfall. On the right
Graham, of the machine-gunners, won the V.C.
For this battle he was attached to the 56th Rifles.
In the advance from the mounds and the heavy
fighting on the left all his men became casualties.
His gun was knocked out, and he was wounded.
McKay, his second-in-command, was hit in the
throat, and died. Graham then went back for his
other gun. This also was knocked out. Mean-
time he had collected two more wounds. Compelled
to retire, he disabled his second gun completely ;
then he carried on with the Lewis-gun, though very
short of ammunition, till a fourth wound put him out
ofaction. Single-handed he held up a strong counter-
attack from the Turks massing on our left. Had
these got round, the Leicestershires would have
been cut off. It is satisfactory to be able to say
that he survived, with no worse hurt than a scar
across his face.

Before noon Wilson asked me to take charge of the
aid-post. Dobson remained with me; Wilson and
Whitehead went up to the wall and established a new
A.P. With me were left many stretcher-cases. In
the confused character of the ground my place
quickly developed into an independent aid-post, and,

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 85

in addition to receiving a stream of walking cases,
methodically passed down by Wilson, had some
hundred and thirty wounded, including Turks, who
had no other treatment than such as Dobson and I
knew how to give. I had never bandaged a man
before, but my hands grew red to the elbow. Dobson
worked grandly. As far as possible I left our own
men to him, and dressed wounded Turks, of whom
seventy were sent inlateinthe afternoon. This was
on the fiat experimentum in corpore vili principle, as
my fingers were unskilled, and yet the work was
very great.

About noon a gun was heard on the left bank of
the river. Shrapnel burst ‘unpleasantly close,’
says Hasted, ‘to our front line. More followed,
and, after bracketing, seemed to centre about two
hundred and fifty yards in front of us. We then
realized that General Marshall’s Column had joined
in, supporting us with enfilade gunfire; we were
unable to see their target, and could see nothing
of the enemy trenches. We could make out single
occasional shivering figures moving laterally in
the mirage. One Turk was seen throwing up
earth, standing up now and then to put up his
hands to us. We tried him at ranges of three
hundred to twelve hundred yards, but did not even
frighten him; observation was absurdly difficult.
Firing slackened down, but on the left, out of sight
in a depression, we could hear the 56th engaged.’

As Hasted remarks, it seems incredible that
our men lay from 11 a.m. till 3.30 p.m. within
three hundred yards of the enemy’s trenches.
Yet such is the fact.

At 4 p.m. we put down a concentrated bombard-

86 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

ment of twenty minutes. The Leicestershires, a
forlorn and depleted hope, moved swiftly up to
within assaulting distance, C Company in reserve
behind the right. The 51st Sikhs supported the
attack. The 56th Rifles put down the heaviest
fire they could, of rifles and all the efficient machine-
guns with the Brigade. At 4.20 the guns lifted
one hundred yards, and the Leicestershires rushed
in. Hasted, watchful behind with C Company,
pushed up rapidly to assist the front line. A long
line of Turks rose from the ground. All these,
and the enemy’s second line also, were taken
prisoners. Dug-outs were cleared, and many officers
were taken, where lofty cliffs overhang the Tigris.
These prisoners were sent back with ridiculously
weak escorts. They were dazed, their spirits
broken. G.A., wounded and falling back in search
of the aid-post, came on a large body, wandering
sheep without a shepherd. These he annexed, and
his orderly led them ; he himself, using the famous
stick as a crook, coaxed them forward. Prisoners
came, ten and twenty in charge of one man. When
night had fallen, they sat round us and curiously
watched us. Altogether the ‘ Tigers ’—hardly two
hundred strong by now—took over eight hundred
prisoners. Many of these escaped by reason of
the poverty of escort.

But I will not speak of prisoners now. Whilst
our scanty stock of ammunition was being fired
at the Turks, retiring rapidly, the Leicestershires
were pushing far out of reach of telephone com-
munication. ‘ Limited objectives were not known

in the open fighting.’ To Captain Diggins fell an

1 Hasted.

?

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 87

amazing success. Suddenly there were flashes
almost in his face. ‘ Guns,’ he shouted, and rushed
forward. On and on he rushed, till he reached the
enemy’s guns, he and three of the men of A
Company, which he commanded. These guns were
in nullas by the river-bank. Their crews were
sitting round them. Diggins beckoned to them to
surrender, which they did. He was so blown with
running that he felt sick and faint. Nevertheless
he recovered, and rose to the occasion. To us,
away in the aid-posts, came epic stories of
‘ Digguens,’ with the ease and magnificence of
Sir Francis Drake receiving an admiral’s sword,
shaking hands with the battery commander. He is
a singularly great man in action, is Fred Diggins.
In all, from several positions, Diggins took seven
fourteen-pounders and two 5.9’s. They were badly
hit, some of them. The horses were in a wretched
condition, none of them unwounded. Several were
shot by us almost immediately. Diggins sent his
prisoners back, battery commanders and all, in
charge of Corporal Williamson and one private.
On his way back, after delivering up his prisoners,
Williamson was killed.

Very soon on Diggins’s arrival his subalterns,
Thorpe and McInerney, joined him. He sent them
racing back across the perilous mile which now lay
between them and the wall. Thorpe went to
Lieutenant-Colonel Knatchbull, and McInerney to
Creagh, the second-in-command this day. All
did their best to get reinforcements. The two other
brigades, however badly hit the previous day,
were now close up. The 19th Brigade, becoming
aware of the situation, eagerly put their services

88 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

at our disposal. After the action the official
explanation of the loss of the guns was that the
Leicestershires got out of hand and went too far ;
so I was told in the colloquial Janguage which I
have set down. A nearer explanation is that they
went because of over-confidence somewhere back.
Night was falling, and the guns already gone,
when reinforcements from the 19th Brigade came
past my aid-post and asked me the direction.
Had the guns been kept, I verily believe at least
one V.C. would have come our way, for Diggins,
and M.C.’s for his lieutenants. As it was, Diggins
got an M.C. and Thorpe a ‘mention.’ Nothing
came to McInerney, who was one of the many
soldiers who went through years of battle, always
doing their duty superbly, but emerging ribbonless
at the end. Six months later, at Tekrit, these
guns took a heavy toll from our infantry. Now,
after all effort, scarcely fifty men could be got up
to them.

In these exalted moments of victory glorious
almost beyond belief Sergeant-Major Whatsize fell,
twenty yards from the enemy’s line. In his last
minutes he was happy, as a child is happy.

The handful at the guns waited. A large barrel
of water had been put there for the Turkish gunners.
This was drained to the last drop. The guns were
curiously examined. ‘Besides the intricate
mechanism and beautifully finished gear, there
were some German sextants and range-finders,
compasses like those on a ship’s binnacle, and other
instruments on a lavish scale,’ says Hasted. But
this inspection was cut short, for now came the
counter-attack. The Turks began to shell the

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 89

captured gun-position. Then, from the railway-
embankment, nearly a mile to the Leicestershires’
left front, several lines of Turks emerged, in ex-
tended formation, a distance of fifty yards between
each line. At least two thousand were. heading
for the fifty Leicestershires holding the guns. ‘ It
was like a crowd at a football-match,’ a spectator
told me. Diggins sent word to Lowther, com-
manding B Company, a little to his left rear, ‘ The
Turks are counter-attacking.’ Lowther replied that
he was falling back. Diggins and Hasted fell
back in conformity. Hasted was asking his men
how many rounds of ammunition they had left.
None had more than five rounds, so perforce we
ceased fire. The 51st Sikhs, with the exception of
Subahdar Aryan Singh and two sepoys, had not
appeared. The Leicestershires damaged the guns
as they might for half a dozen fevered, not to say
crowded, minutes of glorious life. Hasted, who
was one of those who enjoyed this destruction,
complains that they did not know much about
what to do; they burred the breech-block threads
and smashed the sights with pickaxes. The Mills
bombs put in the bores did not explode satisfactorily.
Then they fell back. One of the sergeants was hit
in the chest, Sergeant Tivey, a Canadian; he was
put on one of the Turkish garrons and led along.
“From the attention he received from the enemy’s
guns, they must have thought him a Field-Marshal.’+
The Turks, for all their force, crept up timidly.
After securing the guns, they raced to Tekrit,
thirty miles away. But they sent a large body
in pursuit of the retreating ‘ Tigers.’

1 Hasted.

go THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

The Leicestershires fell back rapidly, the enemy
pressing hard. The 51st Sikhs were found, hidden
by the hollows of the ground; they had been a
buttress to the left flank of that handful of
adventurous infantry in their forward sweep into
the heart of the Turkish position. It was now that
Graham and the 56th Rifles checked the counter-
attack, which threatened to drive a wedge between
the Leicestershires and the river. The whole
front was now connected up, and, in face of an
attacking army, British and Indians dug themselves
in. The 51st sent along some ammunition. The
sun was setting, and in the falling light the last
scene of this hard-fought day took place. Turkish
officers could be seen beating their men with the
flat of their swords. The enemy came, rushing
and halting. The sun, being behind them, threw
a clear field of observation before them; but over
them it flung a glamour and dimness, in which
they moved, a shadow-army, silhouettes that made
a difficult mark. And our men were down to their
last rounds of ammunition. Our guns opened
again, but too late, and did not find their target.
But the Leicestershires’ bombers, sixty men in
all, were thrown forward, bringing ammunition
which saved the day. Thirty of the sixty fell in
thatrush. The Turks were now within two hundred
and fifty yards; but here they wavered. For
half an hour they kept up a heavy rifle-fire. Then,
at six o’clock, the 19th Brigade poured in, and the
thin lines filled up with Gurkhas, Punjabis, and
Seaforths. Moreover, the new-comers had abund-
ance of ammunition. Darkness fell, and our line
pushed forward. For over two hours we could

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA gl

hear the Turks man-handling their guns away.
But there were strong covering-parties, and our
patrols were driven back with loss. Our guns put
down a spasmodic and ineffectual fire. Then all
became quiet. All along the enemy’s line of
retreat and far up the river were flares and bonfires.
Away in Samarra buildings were in flames,
and down the Tigris floated two burning barges,
of which more hereafter.

I cannot speak as they deserve of the gallant
work of the Indian regiments. The severity of
their losses is eloquent testimony. ‘Boomer’
Barrett came down the field, shot through the face,
cheerfully announcing his good luck: ‘I’ve got a
soft one, right through the cheek.’ I have spoken
of the 53rd Sikhs. They lost their four senior
officers, killed. But every regiment had brave
leaders to mourn. One thinks with grief and
admiration of that commander, a noble and greatly
beloved man, whom a bullet struck down, so that
he died without recovering consciousness several
days later. Though the body’s tasks were finished,
his mind worked on the fact that his men had been
temporarily checked, and he kept up the cry,
‘What will they say in England? The fell
back ; failed them.’ Even so, when duty
has become life’s ruling atmosphere,

One stern tyrannic thought which makes
All other thoughts its slave,

it matters little that the body should fail. The
mind labours yet, fulfilling its unconscious allegiance.

He went, unterrified,
Into the Gulf of Death.

92 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

In my aid-post we carried on, secure beneath
our canopy of racing shells. The slope gave cover
against ‘ over’ bullets, except when it was necessary
to walk about. Early in the afternoon, during
a lull, a doctor appeared and asked if it was safe
to bring up his ambulances. I told him ‘ Yes’ ;
there were dropping bullets, but very little shell-
fire. He replied that he would come immediately.
But the supply of shells greatly quickened, and he
did not appear again till near darkness, when he
brought two motor ambulances, taking five sitting
and four lying casesineach. He promised to return,
but did not. Apart from these eighteen, only
the walking wounded got away, pushing back into
our noisy and perilous hinterland.

About four o’clock the Turks, in reply to our
intense bombardment, put a brief but terrific fire
on the mounds, blowing up men on every side.
I decided to clear out to where, round the corner,
an old wall gave upright shelter. As our first
exodus swung round, a huddled, hobbling mass,
two ‘coal-boxes’ burst in quick succession, each
closer than the last shell before it. I shouted
‘Duck!’ We ducked, then made a few yards
and ducked for the second time. A perfect sleet
of wind and steel seemed to pass overhead. But
no one was hit, and we were round the corner,
where, I fear, I dropped the Cherub with con-
siderable emphasis on his gammy leg. But indeed
we were very lucky. Shells burst on every side
of the aid-post—on right and left, but not on us.
This was one of the rare occasions when I have felt
confidence. Dobson and J were far too busied
to worry. Also it seemed hard to believe that a

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 93

shell would be allowed to fall on that shattered,
helpless suffering. I saw, without seeing, things
that are burnt into memory. We had no morphia,
nothing but bandages. There was a man hit in
the head, who just flopped up and down, seemingly
invertebrate as an eel, calling out terribly for an
hour till he died. Another man, also hit in the
head—but he recovered, and I afterwards met
him in Bombay—kept muttering, ‘Oh those guns!
They go through my head!’

A large body of prisoners was massed in the
hollow beside us. When these marched off, some
seventy wounded were sent to me, under the
impression that the place wasaregularaid-post. They
were horribly smashed. General Thomson’s Brigade
(14th Division) had enfiladed them with artillery
fire from the other bank, with dreadful effect.
He got into their reserves, their retreat, their
hospitals, and broke them up. In one place his
fire caught a body of Turks massing for a counter-
attack, beneath big bluffs by the water, and
heaped the sand with dead and maimed. These
men came with their gaping wounds and snapped
limbs. Private Clifton, a friend of mine, brought
bucket after bucket of water from the river. They
drank almost savagely. My inexpert fingers hurt
cruelly as I bandaged them, and they winced and
cried. But the next minute they would stroke
my hand, to show they understood good intentions.
They had a great belief in the superiority of our
civilization—at any rate in its medical aspect.
They insisted, those who had been bandaged by
the Turkish aid-posts, in tearing off their bandages
—perfectly good ones, but smaller than ours—

94 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

and on having new bandages from me. Just when
the 5.9’s blew us round the corner, Waller, adjutant
of the 56th Brigade, R.F.A., came up and asked
if I could send any one to look at some men just
hit by the tornado. Mester Dobson was as busied
as a man could be, his inevitable pipe in his mouth,
so I went with Waller. One man was breathing,
his head broken behind; the others were dead.
Beside one of the corpses was a red mass. I saw,
noting the fact automatically and without the
least squeamishness, that it was his brains. We
carried the living man in.

In the darkness Dobsoncame and said. ‘ There’sa
wounded officer just come in. I’ve given him a
drink and dressed him.’ A minute later he said,
‘ That officer’s dead, sir.’ I went across, and found
it was Scarth, of the 53rd. No braver spirit went
out in this day of storm and sorrow than this very
gallant boy. He was aged nineteen.

Night fell, and slowly o’er the blood-bought mile
They brought a broken body, frail but brave ;
A boy who carried into death the smile

With which he thanked for water that we gave.
Steadfast among the steadfast, those who kept
The narrow pass whereby the Leicesters swept,
Amid the mounded sands of ancient pride

He sleeps where Grattan fell and Adams died.

I know his father, and the Himalayan oaks
and pines amid which he grew to manhood. Men
looking on Scarth loved him. The freshness of
his mountain home and his free, happy life clung
to him to this end, amid the tumults and terrors
of our desert battle.

The son of Hyrtacus, whom Ide
Sent, with his quiver at his side,

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 95

From hunting beasts in forest-brake,
To follow in Aineas’ wake.

At dusk Wilson came. He had been toiling
away, exposed and close up to the fighters, as
always—there mever was a braver regimental
medical officer—and he now asked me to be
responsible for getting his wounded away, whilst
he searched the battlefield. So all his cases were
evacuated into my place. At the same time many
chits reached me, addressed to the O.C. Clearing-
Station. As there was no such person, I opened
these. The regimental aid-posts were pressing
to be cleared. My own place had men from seven
different regiments, British and Indian, as well as
Turks, and Wilson was sending more along. So
I found McLeod, and we ’phoned down to the
field ambulances. These were congested from
yesterday’s battle and to-day’s walking cases, and
replied that nothing could be done till dawn. But
we were so insistent that about midnight bullock-
carts turned up, and I got fifty wounded away.
The ‘ cahars,’? in their zeal to remove all kit belong-
ing to the wounded, carried off my water-bottle,
haversack, rations, and communion-kit. But before
this I had been down to the Tigris in the darkness,
and drunk like a wounded wolf.

To return to the battle as it died away. The
Forward Observing Officer with the Leicestershires
sent word back that fourteen guns (instead of nine)
had been taken. The news was exultantly for-
warded to Corps H.Q. When the case proved
to be nine only, and those nine lost again, the

1 #neid, Book [X, Conington’s translation.
2 Indian hospital orderlies and bearers,

96 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

message was allowed to stand, the authorities
hoping against hope that the guns would walk back
into our possession. And Fortune was very good
to them. Those guns, indeed, came not back;
but, as darkness fell, two burning barges, as already
mentioned, floated down the river. One was
exploding, like a magazine on fire. This contained
ammunition. The other barge, when pulled to
shore, was found to contain fourteen field-guns,
the number specified to Corps—old guns, but
serviceable. Johnny, despairing of getting these
away, had set fire to the barge to sink them. So
the original message stood, and our loss could be
glossed over. And the wastefulness of sinking
quite good guns was avoided.

The night was sleepless, bitterly cold. Dobson
and I kept a watch for Arabs. I sat beside a dead
man, and shared his oil-sheet. A few more wounded
came in after midnight, among them Sergeant
Tivey. All night long wounded Turks crawled the
battlefields and cried in the cold. But I heard
none of them, for there were groans much nearer.
Our unwounded prisoners were crowded into a
nulla. Among them was the Turkish Artillery
Brigade Commander, who knew some English and
kept insisting on a hearing from time to time.
But all he ever said was, ‘ Yes, gentlemen, you
have got my guns, but, what is far worse, you have
got me.’ Had we cared, we might have cheered
him with the information that we had not got his
guns, but only himself. Yet, considering the
relative value, in his eyes, of himself and these,
such information would hardly have consoled him.

In this battle occurred a case of a man being

Viale

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 97

‘fey.’ An officer gave his kit and money to his
batman, for distribution to his platoon, the previous
night. As he went into action a friend exchanged
greetings. He replied, ‘Yes, but I’m afraid I’m
not coming back to-day.’ No one saw him fall,
but he was found dead in the mounds, with several
wounds.

The east was reddening when I saw Haughton,
Staff-Captain of the 19th Brigade, on the hillock
above the aid-post. This Brigade H.Q. were my
best friends in the division. I begged a mug of
tea from him, so we went along together. If ound
General Peebles and Brigade-Major Thornhill, and
they gave me an excellent breakfast.

The 28th Brigade moved on, following the 21st
Brigade, who occupied Samarra. But the wounded
remained. Shortly after dawn the medical folk,
in fulfilment of their promise, sent up an ordinary
motor-car and took away two sitting cases. Nothing
else happened. Time passed, and the heat was
getting up. So I wandered back some miles, and
found hospital-tents. Here was Father Bernard
Farrell, the Roman Catholic padre, slaving, as he
had done all night. I saw Westlake, and Sowter,
who was dying. ‘It’s been a great fight, padre,’
said Sowter, ‘a great fight. I’m getting better.’
No loss was felt more severely than that of this
quiet, able man. He had seen much fighting in
France, and in this, his first action with us, he
impressed every one with his coolness and efficiency.
He had walked across to Lowther, his company
commander, to draw his attention to a new and
threatening movement of the enemy. Then, as
he stopped to bandage a wounded sergeant, a

G

98 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

bullet pierced his stomach. The same _ bullet,
leaving his body, went through both legs of Sergeant
Lang, the one bullet making six holes. Sowter
had been with us one week. I never knew any
one whose influence went so deep in so brief a
time.

Our seven-days’ guest, he came and went his ways,
Walking the darkness garlanded with praise !

Our seven-days’ guest! Yet love that this man gained
Others have scarce in three-score years attained,

The hospital-tents were congested with wounded,
and the responsible officer declined to take any
more. They had no more stretchers, all being
used as beds, and no more space. Fortunately an
order came from Division that they must im-
mediately remove some wounded Turks. I said,
‘TI have some wounded Turks.’ ‘ Yes, but I’m
afraid those aren’t the Turks meant.’ ‘ Well,’
I replied, ‘ I’ve been up all night, and I’m very
footsore. You might at least give me a lift back.’
This was conceded, and I returned in the first of
five motor-ambulances. The corporal-in-charge had
no idea where he was to find the wounded Turks,
so I swept him into my place. This I cleared of
every one but a few horribly wounded prisoners,
and sent on a note to the M.O. of the 51st Sikhs.

The previous day two wounded Turks, a machine-
gun officer and a Red Crescent orderly, had arrived
in the aid-post. The latter helped nobly with the
wounded, so I had a note sent down with them,
that they had earned good treatment. The officer
had a friend from the same military college in
Stamboul, which friend had a ghastly shell-wound

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 99

in his back. What happened, I think, was this.
When his friend was knocked out, the unwounded
officer—they were both boys, well under twenty
—brought up a medical orderly. All three were
then overwhelmed by our rush, and in the confusion
the unwounded men kept with the other, to see
that he got treatment when opportunity came.
So they slipped into my aid-post, where they
stopped all night, making no offer to escape. I
sent a message to Brigade, but their reply, a verbal
one which did not reach me till next evening, was
that they had better stay where they were. The
unwounded officer’s silent anxiety for his friend
was most touching, and I pushed the latter away
with the midnight convoy. Next morning I sent
both officer and orderly to the nearest prisoners’
camp; but the sergeant-in-charge returned them,
with word that he took only wounded prisoners.
So I had to keep them. Weir, the staff-captain,
joined me, and we talked to the officer in French
while we waited for the divisional second line to
come up. We were puzzled as to why the Turks
left a position so strong as Istabulat before being
actually driven out. The officer’s reply was,
‘ Because of the éiar’ (aeroplane). I cannot follow
this, unless, misunderstanding us, he was referring
to this second day’s fight and the aeroplane brought
down at the beginning. Perhaps, being afraid
to send up any other ’planes, they were deceived
as to our number. He insisted that we had had
three divisions in action, and was mortified when
we told him the truth.

The sun was getting very hot, and, since no more
ambulances came, we were troubled for the few

100 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

pitifully smashed Turks who still remained. We
got covers of sorts for them, though we could not
prevent the flies from festooning their wounds.
‘It’s up to us to do our best,’ said Weir. ‘We
shouldn’t care for it if our wounded were left by
them.’ In the afternoon ambulances began to
arrive, and I evacuated these few and saw
the evacuation of the Indian regimental A.P.’s
commence. My dead were buried, and their
“graves effaced, so far as possible, against prowling
Buddus. The second line arrived, so my prisoners
and I set out on our tired trudge to Samarra.
I told the Turks of our Somme successes (as we
then took them to be) and our more recent March
victories in Flanders, pointing out the big improve-
ment. ‘In the beginning we had little artillery,
but now we have much.’ ‘ Beaucoup,’ he repeated,
with conviction. In every way one spared a brave
enemy’s feelings. Last year they had won; now
it wasourturn. ‘Thatisso,’saidhe. This thought
comforted him, and the memory of their great
triumphs before Kut in early 1916. Did he not
wear a medal for those days? ‘Pour le mérite,’
the orderly proudly told me. I begged scraps of
biscuits from men on the march, and we shared
them. I expressed regret for this march on empty
stomachs. ‘C'est toujours la marche,’ said the
officer, shrugging his shoulders. Truly, it must
have been; a nightmare of rapid movement and
sleeplessness even for us who pursued—-hammer
and chase ever since Maude broke up the Turkish
lines before Kut.

As we marched I found that the Indians took
us for three prisoners and not two, I being a German

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA IOI

officer. But when J. Y. cantered up and hailed
me, a laugh ran down the column, with the words
“Padre Sahib.’ At Samarra the first person we
ran into was General Peebles, to whom I handed
over my prisoners, with a request that they should
be fed. Haughton promised to see to this. Then
a pleasant thing happened. The Turkish officer
stepped quickly up to me, saluted, and held out
his hand. I saluted back, and we shook hands.
They were good fellows, both officer and orderly,
and carried themselves like free men.

It wasnow5p.m. I joined the‘ Tigers.’ Fowké
and Lowther had each killed a snake after laying
their blankets down. They gave me good greeting.
I fed and washed, then slept abundantly.

For the two Istabulat battles the official return
of captures was: Twenty officers and six hundred
and sixty-seven men, one 5.9, fourteen Krupp
field-guns, two machine-guns, twelve hundred and
forty rifles, a quantity of hand-grenades, two
hundred rounds of gun-ammunition, five hundredand
forty thousand rounds of rifle-ammunition, four
limbers, sixteen engines, two hundred and forty
trucks, one crane, spare wheels and other stores, two
munition barges. Samarra Station was dismantled,
but the engines and trucks were there. Up to the
last the Turk had meant to keep the railhead, so
the engines were only partly disabled, boilers
having been removed from some and other parts
from others. By putting parts of engines together
we got a sufficiency of usable engines. Within
a fortnight we had trains running.

For the battle of the 22nd both Diggins and
Lowther got M.C.’s. If it was the former’s élan

102 THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA

which carried our wave into the enemy’s guns,
the latter’s judgement played a great part in
extricating us without disaster. Hasted, the alert
and watchful, had already been gazetted after
the fall of Baghdad as D.S.O. He left us shortly
after, returning to his own regiment, the Durham
Light Infantry, in India. In Rawal Pindi he
delivered a lecture on the action in which he had
played so brilliant a part.

It would be interesting to know if Hasted has
ever had an enemy. His personal charm is almost
greater than any man has a right to have, especially
when the Gods have already made that man an
able soldier and administrator. But it is an unfair
world.

These awards were announced in a Gazette nearly
a year later. To Sowter, had he lived, would have
fallen a third M.C. Fowke, as well as Thorpe, got
a ‘mention,’ of which he was utterly unaware, being
away sick, till I ran into him in Kantara? in 1918,
about eleven o’clock at night. I roused him from
sleep for a chat. When I told him of his‘ mention,’
he considered that I was making a very successful
attempt to be humorous, and laughed himself to
sleep again. At intervals till dawn I heard him still
laughing in his dreams at a notion so ridiculous.

I hope that some other will tell of the deeds of
the Indian regiments. Even more I hope that
some one will tell, as I cannot, of the gallant and
costly charge which our cavalry made on the
Turkish trenches to our left, a charge which stag-
gered the enemy as he swung round to cut off the
Leicestershires. The 32nd Lancers lost, among

1 On the Suez Canal.

THE BATTLE FOR SAMARRA 103

others, their Colonel (Griffiths) and their Adjutant
(Captain Hunter), killed. :

These two days’ fighting at Istabulat and for
Samarra cost us about two thousand four hundred
casualties. The 28th Brigade, on the 22nd, lost
four hundred and forty-six men. The enemy’s
losses, including prisoners, must have been at least
three thousand.

My one note for April 24 is ‘ Flies.” It was high
summer, and in the terrible and waxing heats we
lay for over a month longer, with no tents, and with
no shelter save our blanket-bivvies. We were the
more wretched in that we occupied an old enemy
camp, and were entered into full possession of its
legacy of filth and flies. On the first Sunday my
morning service was swathed in dust, one swirling
misery, and I was sore tempted to preach, fore-
seeing the days to come, on ‘ These are but the
beginning of sorrows.’

V
SUMMER AND WAITING

SAMARRA was entered on April 23, the 21st and
8th Brigades going through the 19th and 28th
Brigades. These brigades followed during the
course of the day, and the ridge of Al-Ajik fell into
our hands. From Samarra northwards high bluffs
run with the river, pushing out to it from plateaus
stretching across the heart of Jezireh and climbing
again beyond the river to the Jebel Hamrin. Below
the bluffs are wide spaces of dead ground, beds
which the Tigris has forsaken. On the right bank,
before the dead ground begins and directly opposite
Samarra town, is a plain some ten or dozen miles
in length, between the mounds of the battle of
April 22 and the crest of Al-Ajik; this plain may
be three miles broad. Al-Ajik covers and com-
mands all approaches from the north, and, with the
central plateau, shuts the plain within a crescent.
Here, behind Al-Ajik, lay our camp for the next
seven months.

North from Al-Ajik the plateau rolls away to
Tekrit, and the same rolling country lies to west-
ward also, broken with nulla and water-hole. To
Tekrit, more than twenty miles beyond, the
Turkish Army fled.

Samarra is a dirty, sand-coloured town, with

104

SUMMER AND WAITING 105

no touch of brightness but what its famous dome
gives it. This dome it was that shone over against
the sunset, the last earthly beauty for so many eyes,
on that evening of savage battle when the 7th
Division flung out its leading brigade and reached,
all but held, the Turkish guns. The dome hides the
cavern into which the Twelfth Imam vanished,
and from which he will emerge, bringing righteous-
ness to a faithless world. Just beyond the dome
rises the corkscrew tower, built in imitation of the
Babylonian ziggurats. To the north-east is ‘ Julian’s
Tomb,’ a high pyramid in the desert. It was near
Samarra that he suffered defeat and died of wounds.
For twenty miles round, in Beit Khalifa, Eski
Baghdad, and elsewhere, is one confused huddle of
ruins. It is hard to believe that such tawdry mag-
nificence as MHarun’s successors intermittently
brought to the town during the precarious times
of Abbasid decay is responsible for all these arches
and caverns and tumbled bricks. Major Kenneth
Mason, already mentioned as having identified
Xenophon’s Sittake, has collected good reasons for
placing Opis, once the great mart of the East, at
Eski Baghdad, and not where the maps conjecturally
place it, twenty miles farther down Tigris. In
summer, green is none save in patches by the river ;
but a thin scurf of yellow grass and coarse herbage
overspread the ruins, in which were abundant
partridges and quails. Germans had been excavat-
ing before we came, and we found in the town
many cases of antiquities, ready packed for trans-
port to Europe. The 7th Division, digging their
positions, presently found pottery, glazed fragments,
and tear-bottles.

106 SUMMER AND WAITING

The town is walled, and sits above steep bluffs.
Tigris, swift and clear like a mountain stream,
races by, dividing round an island. Below the town
is another island, with an expanse of shingle towards
the right bank; to this island Divisional Head
Quarters went, a most unfair avoidance of the ‘ dust-
devils’ which plagued their brethren. Here were
tamarisk thickets, haunted with great metallic
beetles, with such wings as Eastern smiths know
how touse. The green bushes were good to the eyes,
and a pleasant curtain from flying sand. But a
sudden rise in the river flushed its shallow right
arm, and made the place an island in reality and all
inconvenience. The righteous, seeing this, rejoiced.

The brigades scattered over the plain, the 8th
Brigade going on, after brief pause, to the ravines
and jungles of the Adhaim, where the war was
dying. May’s first week swept the Turk out of the
Adhaim Valley, and our troops settled down for
the summer.

The brigades scattered; blankets came up, and
we slept. For over a month we had only bivvies,
the usual rifle-supported blanket, tugging and
straining at the stones which held it whenever a
‘ dust-devil’ danced by or a sandstorm arose. But
E.P.+ tents dribbled in. Even mails began to
arrive, and parcels; and to me, on the first day of
ease, came a jubilant telegram from my old friends
of the 19th Brigade: ‘ Come and have tea with us.
We have acake!’ I went, and found them where
the shingles led to Divisional Island. Blue rollers
swung themselves on the air below the cliffs; and
on the pebbles an owl skipped and danced, showing

1 European privates’,

SUMMER AND WAITING 107

off in the beautiful evening sunlight. This was a
daily performance, Thornhill told me. It had been
General Peebles’ birthday, and the brag about the
cake was splendidly justified. There were buns
also.

Summer dragged by. In Baghdad pomegranates
blossomed, mulberries fruited, figs ripened. But
in Samarra the desert throbbed and shimmered
in the growing and great heats. Worst of all, we
missed the dates. The fresh dates are the one
solace of Mesopotamia. My campaigning recollec-
tions are embittered by this memory, that both
my two date-seasons were spent up the line, at
Sannaiyat and Samarra, where dates never came.
Till mid-May the nights remained cool. Mesopo-
tamia’s extremes are amazing. After a day intoler-
able as I have found very few days in India will
come a night, not close and sleepless as an Indian
night, but cool, even cold. In the April fighting
we found the nights bitter. So May gave us
a fortnight of tolerable nights; but then fire
settled on the land. The flies all died. But the
infantry had an elaborate trench-system to dig,
so they were not able to die. The ground was
solid gypsum.

Changes happened. Generals Peebles and Davies
went to India on leave. The enemy’s Intelligence
Department, alert as ever, noted the fact, and gave
it out that our losses in the Istabulat battles were
even heavier than they had supposed at first, for
two generals had left the front, casualties. Such a
statement was twice blessed: it cheered the enemy,
and cheered us also. In my own brigade Thorpe
became staff-captain, in place of Weir, who went

108 SUMMER AND WAITING

home. To all the Leicestershires, and to me
especially, Thorpe’s going was a heavy loss. ‘I
could have better spared a better man.’ I must
henceforth botanize alone. No longer could he teach
young subalterns to ‘practise music ’—in the
Socratic sense, that the best music was philosophy—
to be repaid with their affectionate regard as
‘Daddy.’ He wrote to me, a month after his going,
that he was becoming as ‘great a horseman as
John Wesley’; and he lost weight during that
summer. He lost a good deal his first week, and
in this manner. The Bishop of Nagpur was due
to visit us, and all who had subscribed their religion
officially as ‘ C. of E.’ were commanded to brighten
belts and buttons for a service parade on Wednesday
at 6 ak. emma. The parade was held, every one
arriving, of course, considerably before the hour.
The Divisional General was there, and many generals
and colonels ; in fact, every Anglican of note, except
Thorpe, who sent word, about 6.30, that he had
made a mistake, and the service was to be next day,
Thursday, at the same hour. At this announcement
a wave of uncontrollable grief swept over the vast
assembly, and for some days Thorpe was a fugitive.
But he returned to normal courses, and in time even
this witty inauguration of his reign was forgiven.
But I had many inquiries as to the tenets of
Wesleyanism.

For me, I went sick; recovered; and went sick
again, drifting down-stream, and to India. But
first Thornhill, Bracken the machine-gunner, and I
explored Al-Ajik.

Once upon a time the river had washed the foot
of Al-Ajik ridge. But now a long stretch of dead

SUMMER AND WAITING 109

ground intervenes before water is reached. Local
legend says a lady lived here who played Hero toa
Leander on the opposite bank. More obviously,
Al-Ajik castle guarded Samarra from the north.
The castle is on steep crags, with vast nullas in
front. In the old days it should have been impreg-
nable. Underneath are very large vaults, filled
with rubbish. As our exploring party came up
a pair of hawks left their eyrie, and circled round us,
screaming their indignation. When the division
first reached Al-Ajik, Thornhill said, a pair of
Egyptian vultures (Pharaoh’s Chickens) were nest-
ing here. These had gone. They are rare birds in
Mesopotamia, and I never saw them north of Sheikh
Saad. Thornhill had seen Brahminy Duck in a
nulla, so we searched till we found a tunnel. Bracken
leading, we got in some hundred yards, stooping
and striking matches, till we came on a heap of
bones. Thornhill surmised a hyena, so we returned,
as no one wished to fight even that, unarmed and in
a diameter of less than five feet. There must be
many tunnels leading into the heart of Al-Ajik
fortress; and here, as everywhere on the plateau,
were remains of the most complicated irrigation
system the ancient world knew. The castle, as it
stands, has been largely built out of the ruined
portions on its northern face.

Life was scant at Samarra, as poor as it had been
abundant at Sannaiyat. The crested larks were of
a new species. Owls nested in the old wells; and
most units were presently owning their owlets or
kestrels or speckled kingfishers, miserable-looking
birds. Sandgrouse were few, but commoner towards
the central plateau, where were water-holes. Gazelles

4

IIo SUMMER AND WAITING

were often seen by pickets, and used to break across
the railway-line, to water at the river. One regiment
took a Lewis-gun after them, and other folk chased
them in motor-cars. The British army, as ever,
busied itself, as opportunity came, in its self-
appointed task of simplifying the country’s fauna
that the naturalist’s work might be easier. Wherefore
the gazelles left our precincts, but still haunted the
channels of the Dujail, by Beled and Istabulat.
For most of the year the water-holes sufficed them,
the green, velvet dips, with zizyph-bushes fringing
each hollow, which redeem the desert. Hedgehog
quills and skins were common, as everywhere in
Mesopotamia. A vast hedgehog led C Company of
the Leicestershires nightly to their picket-stations.
On its first appearance a man ran to bayonet it,
but the officer did not see the necessity of this, and
stopped him. So the urchin lived, and ever after
paced gravely before its friends. Then we had the
usual birds. Storks nested in the town; there
were rollers and kingfishers, and a hawk or two.
But the desert, with its starved crop of dwarf thorns,
had no place for bird or animal. Men who saw
Samarra after my time raved of its winter glory,
its irises, its grass knee-high, its splendid anemones.
But in summer the land lay desolate. Nothing
abounded but scorpions, mantidae, and grass-
hoppers.

And nothing happened but the heat. In July,
in ghastly heat, men were expected to take Ramadie.
They failed, most of their heavy casualties being
from heat-stroke. But that was the Connaught
Rangers and a Euphrates affair. At Samarra
we experienced nothing more dangerous than

SUMMER AND WAITING rit

Fritz’s' visits. Once or twice he bombed the
station. When the railway began running, there
were two accidental derailments, in the second of
which several men were killed and General Maude
had a narrow escape. By Sumaikchah a British
officer and his Indian escort were waylaid and
murdered. The murderers were outlawed; but a
year later the first on our list of the whole gang
walked back into occupied territory and was taken
and hanged, despite the wish of the Politicals to
spare him. Of all these events, such as they were,
we heard from Barron—‘the bold, bad Barron,’
who left the Leicestershires to take up ‘important
railway duties ’ pending the renewal of fighting.
These matters are dull enough; but no recital
can be so dull as the times were, and we had to
live through them. At Samarra the division worked
unmolested through the awful heats, digging the
hard ground, cutting avenues for machine-gun fire,
making strong points. Wilson had gone, but he
had an adequate successor in Haigh. Thanks to
him, the Leicestershires established the singular
fact that Samarra is the healthiest spot in the world.
One man died, in place of the dreadful sequence of
deaths a year before at Sannaiyat. The division’s
daily sick-rate was .g a thousand! The Leicester-
shires and the Indian battalions did even better.
And yet we spent the summer in a place where
fresh vegetables were unprocurable, except a most
inadequate supply of melons and (rarely) beans.
Djinns scoured the plain, and at any hour of any
day half a score of ‘ dust-devils’ could be seen
racing or sweeping majestically along—each djinn

1 A new Fritz, of course. The old one was killed at Istabulat,

112 SUMMER AND WAITING

seemed to make his own wind and choose his own
pace—now towering to a height of several hundred
feet, with vast, swirling base, and now trailing
a tenuous mist across a nulla. Our few hens ran
panting into the tents, ejected at one door, only
to enter at another. And yet, as I have said, only
one man died—with the battalion, that is—and
ridiculously few went sick. But by Colonel Knatch-
bull’s death in Baghdad the battalion lost its
commander, and the division a very fine soldier.
Wounded at Sheikh Saad in January, 1916, he had
returned in time for the three railhead battles.
He struggled on with sickness, refusing to con-
template a second leave to India, and died at
midsummer.

The worst of the heats I escaped. After a spell
in Beit Na’ama, the delightful estuary-side officers’
hospital, a tangle of citron and fig-groves, with
vines making cool roofs, and with the Shat-el-Arab
flowing by, I was discharged. Feeling more
wretched than ever, I lingered on at Busra in the
poisonous billets, filthy Arab houses, named by
their present occupants ‘ Flea Villa,’ ‘ Bug Cottage,’
“Muddy View’ (this would be for winter; the
world nowhere else holds such mud as Busra mud).
Busra is hateful beyond words; any place up the
line is preferable, except perhaps Twin Canals?
and Beled. I was to be returned to duty ‘in due
course’; but the Transport authorities were never
in a hurry. It was like being slowly baked in a
brick oven. I had spent ten days so, with no
prospect of being given a boat up-stream, when

- ed Kut, on the right bank of the Tigris. A pestilential haunt
n 1916.

SUMMER AND WAITING II3

some one told General Fane, the O.C. 7th Division,
that I had been very sick and was waiting to get
back to duty. He said, ‘ Nonsense,’ and sent a wire
direct to G.H.Q., insisting that I be given a month’s
leave in India. I got it immediately. But for
this action, leave could not have come my way.
No division ever had a kinder O.C. than Fane.
He knew every one, and was constantly doing
thoughtful acts such as this.

India, when it found time to give thought to
Mesopotamia, chattered of the tremendous Turco-
German offensive which was to sweep down from
Mosul in the autumn. When I returned, at the end
of August, all down the line I found excitement.
Only at Samarra itself was quiet and ease of mind,
where old comrades greeted me joyously and intro-
duced new-comers. There was Fergusson, reputed
to have half a century of ranching and _horse-
dealing in the Argentine ; ‘ Forty-nine,’ said Fowke,
in a delighted whisper, assessing his age. (As a
matter of fact, Fergusson’s years were forty-one.)
There was ‘ Ezra’ (‘ Likewise Beetle,’ interpolated
Fowke), who had arrived the day I went sick.
‘Ezra,’ who signed his name as Mason, and was
brother of Kenneth Mason, engineer and archaeolo-
gist, got his nickname from a supposed modelling
of his bald dome upon Ezra’s Tomb, by Q’urna.
Keely, classical scholar and philosopher, was stand-
ing outside his tent, pondering, as I came up to
rejoin the battalion. He called me up, and asked
me earnestly what girl from Greek literature I
should like to have known, even to have had as
companion on the Thames at Richmond. ‘ Nausicaa,’
Isaid. ‘ Every time,’ agreed Keely, brightening up

H

II4 SUMMER AND WAITING

as if a heavy load had been lifted from his mind,
and begged me to have a drink in her honour. Bale
and Charles Copeman were away, by AI-Ajik;
‘in the nearest E.P. tent to Constantinople,’ G.A.
said. Of our wounded, only G.A. was _ back.
Warren came later; Westlake remained in India.

Some surprise was expressed that I had returned
at all. This was Thorpe’s doing. To explain, I
must go back a little. I knew Thorpe years before
the war. We met again in Sannaiyat trenches.
His messmates, who desired to know more of
Thorpe’s old life, asked me how we met first. ‘I
was chaplain of a jail at Peterborough,’ I replied.
The statement was received at once; the only head
on which further light was sought was as to the
number of years that were deducted from his sen-
tence for service in Mesopotamia. (Convicts from
India who came out in the Labour Corps to Mesopo-
tamia were remitted ten years.) Now, during my
Indian Jeave, an old friend found me out and took
me to spend the last days of my Darjiling visit with
him. He was, among other things, superintendent
of the prison. I carelessly wrote to Thorpe on a
sheet of paper with the printed heading ‘ Jail-house,
Darjiling.’ Thorpe spent July and August in
taking this sheet round from mess to mess. He
blackened my reputation, and opened up a field of
speculation as to the reason of my incarceration.
“No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though
he hath escaped from the sea ’—from Mesopotamia,
say—‘ yet Justice hath not suffered to live.’ He
considered that he was level with me for my Peter-
borough jail-jape, and was much cheered.

It took the best part of September to get up-stream

SUMMER AND WAITING 115

and back to Samarra. When the boat reached
Busra, scores of men were prostrate on the deck
from heat-stroke and exhaustion. In the Gulf
I had a funeral. I tried to skip to the finish of
the service, with the page shimmering and jump-
ing before me, but had to hand the book to the
captain as I reeled down. He threw the body
over, and every one flew up-deck. Later, on the
up-stream trip, we realized the fact on which all
Mesopotamia agreed, that for sheer horror the
deck of a P-boat! is unrivalled. Possibly it is
due to the glare from the water, but our daily
temperatures of between 115° and 125° in the
shade seemed a hundredfold higher than they
were. Just below Kut we were held up for several
days in a camp; not even Sheikh Saad in the old,
bad days was more cursed with sandflies.

I had for companion on board Kenneth Mason,
engineer and archaeologist. We passed Sannaiyat
and the winding reaches where every earth-scar
and mound had a history. Here the Turk had
blown up the ammunition barges, and for hundreds
of yards inland the ground was still strewn with
twisted scrap-iron ; here he had set his 5.9’s on the
balloon, and theevening fishing had beeninterrupted ;
here used to be the advanced dressing-station in
the times of trench warfare ; here was Left Bank
Group, where our guns had been, the tamarisk
thickets and wheeling harriers, and the old shell-
holes on the beach. Those crumbling sandbanks
were Mason’s Mounds, and those were Crofton’s
O. Pip. * Here were Abu Roman Mounds, and
here. the lines of Nakhailat or Suwada; here were

1 Paddle-boat. 4 Observation post,

116 SUMMER AND WAITING

the Beit Aiessa defences; here those of Abdul
Hassan and E Mounds. It was on that angle that
the Juinar grounded in that despairing, impossible
attempt to run the blockade and bring food to
Townshend’s men. It was in that scrub that the
Turks and H.L.I.* crashed when both sides launched
a simultaneous attack.

We passed Kut. The river was low, and the
people were growing lettuce, while they might, on
the dried sandbanks. The town front against the
palms showed its shell-holes and caverns, and we
remembered how we used to see the city, from
Dujaileh Redoubt, rising up like a green promontory.
From Townshend’s first battle there to the day
when the 7th Division occupied the lines of Suwada,
Kut cost us not less in battle casualties than sixty
thousand men. One makes no computation of the
dead in the old cholera camps by Abu Roman,
or in a score of cemeteries from Sannaiyat and Es-
Sinn to Bombay, who perished in that time when

the shark-tracked ships went down
To Bombay Town.

Kut will be a place of pilgrimage, and deserves to
be, even among the many shrines of this war.
From Sheikh Saad to Shumran is one graveyard
and battlefield, a stretch of thirty miles, where
over twenty pitched battles took place, many
being British defeats. At Kut itself Townshend’s
old trenches can be traced; and in the town are
broken buildings, and, to eastward, the monument
erected by the Turks. Across the river is the

1 Highland Light Infantry.

SUMMER AND WAITING 117

Shat-el-Hai and its complicated and costly battle-
fields, and the relics of the famous liquorice factory
which Townshend held, and which we took, in 1917,
almost last of all. At Shumran, above the town,
is the place of the great crossing. And on the
ribs of sand, when water is low, are liquorice-stacks
and lettuce-beds.

The mud-strips green with lettuce, red with stacks
Of liquorice ; shattered walls, and gaping caves:
Beyond, the shifting sands; the jackal’s tracks ;
The dirging wind; the wilderness of graves.

The evening of September 13, the lofty Arch of
Ctesiphon showed for hours as we toiled along the
winding reaches ; in the first gold and chill winds
of dawn on the 14th we watched it recede. On
the 18th I reached Beled, ‘ The Home of the Devil,’
as the Arabs call it, where the Manchesters dragged
out a panting existence, battling with dust-storms.
In the station I was shocked to see what vandalism
had been at work. The broken glass had been
cleared away ; in the tin shed where we had drunk
tea amid the flying shrapnel on that Easter evening
new panes had been put in; the water-tower had
been replaced. With dusk I reached Samarra,
and set Keely’s mind at rest on the Greek girl
question.

Through October Fritz came daily, photographing.
The sole rays in a dreary protraction of existence
were afforded by the Intelligence Summaries,
run by Captain Lang, a versatile and popular
humorist. Deserters reported that at a certain
place the enemy’s staff consisted of only one lame
Turk and one ‘powerful Christian.’ The ‘powerful

118 SUMMER AND WAITING

Christian’ had to do all the work, and was pre-
paring for a hegira to our lines. Then we
had exchanged prisoners recently, sending back
eight wounded men, one having but one leg. On
reaching the Turco lines, when we offered to give
these wounded a further lift of some miles, the
offer was accepted with cringing gratitude.
‘Intelligence ’ surmised that these wounded might
have to walk to Mosul, another hundred and forty
miles, and went into reverie on the situation’s
possibilities. ‘If the one-legged man has any
influential friends in Constantinople, we may
expect to hear shortly of a Turkish Commission
in Iraq.’ That was the time when the Report of
the Mesopotamian Commission came out. Though
a revelation in England, it did not excite us, who
knew its facts long before. Then letters from
the enemy G.H.Q. to General Maude had had his
name and address printed on the envelope. This,
‘Intelligence’ thought, was sheer, outstanding
swank, to show us that the Turks had at least one
lithograph.

Late in September our second attempt on
Ramadie met with complete success, when General
Brooking captured the nucleus of a_ projected
offensive against us. We by Tigris rejoiced, know-
ing, too, that our task, when it came, would be
the easier.

The 1st Guides joined the division in place of
the ‘ Bo-Peeps.’ The brigades went out on recon-
naissance frequently. September 25 saw one of
these shows, which included a sham fight. The
day was very hot, and Haigh’s stretcher-bearers
complained of the inconsiderate conduct of the

SUMMER AND WAITING IIQ

thirty-one ‘ casualties.’ ‘ Unfortunately there were
no dead among them.’ However, as one S.B.
added, ‘ fortunately a good many died of wounds.’
The ‘died of wounds’ were formed into platoons,
and marched off the field of action.

The stretcher-bearer who made the remark
about the ‘died of wounds’ was a particular
friend of mine, who had a great gift of happy
phrasing, illustrated in the words I have quoted.
Once we had a long talk about the old battles,
and, speaking of a common friend who had been
killed, he observed, ‘I do think it dreadful, his
being killed like that—killed outright.’ I never
got at his notion of what made a cushy death ;
probably something Mexican or early mediaeval.

Through October my diary notes little but
services and a terrible lecture on Mesopotamian
history, which, from first to last, I delivered over
fifty times. Latterly envious tongues alleged that
I had to ask units for a parade when I gave this
lecture. But those who said this lied saucily and
shamelessly.

VI

HUWESLET: OR, ‘THE BATTLE OF JUBER
ISLAND’

Night’s blackness touched with red ;

A cock’s shrill clarion ringing ;

Clamours for ‘ ruddy’ buckets, Diamond’s? bray ;
Grousing of Johnson* tumbled out of bed ;

And Fowke’s falsetto, singing

‘Is it nothing to you?’

So the battalion wakes, to march away

Heaven knows how far into the blue,

Heaven knows how many weary miles to do,
Till stars within some nulla watch us lie,
Worshipping sleep, while the icy hours drag by.

OcTOBER 22 was the date when Johnny developed
unheard-of cheek. His patrols appeared by the
river, one fellow riding along our wire and slashing
it with his sword. Then from 1 p.m. onwards he
shelled both banks of the river, having pushed
down from his advanced post at Daur, a dozen
miles away, with a couple of hundred cavalry,
several machine-guns, and light field-guns. The
Guides and our cavalry were reported to have lost
men and horses; and G.A., on picket, sent word
that the Turks were digging themselves in. A and

1 The regimental (four-footed) donkey. The Leicestershires’
hatbadge is a black diamond.

§ Needless to say, we had no ‘ Johnson,’
20

HUWESLET I2I

C Companies of the Leicestershires were out all
day.

On the 23rd shelling continued, and that evening
the division moved out. At the officers’ meeting
we were told that a force, estimated at four thousand
Turks and several guns, was digging in. We were
to do twelve thousand two hundred yards north,
and then seven thousand five hundred yards half-
right, to get behind them. This was the 28th
Brigade. The 8th and i1gth Brigades, starting
later, were to make a frontal attack at 4 a.m. ;
our brigade were to enfilade the Turk when bolted ;
and these united efforts were to drive him into the
dead ground by the river, and there, as the scheme
wittily put it, our artillery and machine-guns
would ‘deal with him.’ Whoever drew up the
plan was not only bloody-minded but oblivious of
long experience, assuming thus that John was
such a very simple person.

We moved off just before dark, raising a white
dust. Through all our wide detour there were
strict injunctions against smoking, enforced among
the Leicestershires, ignored among machine-gunners
and Indian drivers. Never can night-march have
been noisier. At every halt the mules sang down
the whole length of the line ; signallers and gunners
clattered past. About midnight a stranger was
seen talking to some drabis.t_ A _ Leicestershire
sergeant, coming up, said, ‘ Hullo, it’s a bloody
Turk.’ Hearing himself identified, Johnny turned
round and saluted. He was led to the proper
authorities, and proved to be a Turkish cadet.
He was armed with a penknife and a pair of gloves,

+ Jndian drivers,

122 ; HUWESLET

The night was bitterly cold. At 3.30 a.m. we
‘rested.’ We had reached what in Mesopotamia
would be considered well-wooded country, an
upland studded with bushes. Just on dawn we
rose, with teeth chattering and limbs numbed
with contact with the cold ground, and moved on.
Our planes appeared, scouring the sky; and a
few odd bursts of rifle-fire were heard about 7 a.m.
We had now reached the edge of the dead ground
against the river, and looked down to Tigris, as in
later days I have looked down to the Jordan.
The doctor and I were told to set up our aid-post
in a deep nulla there, and wait on events. A
report came from our air-folk that five thousand
Turks were on Juber Island, opposite Huweslet.
We moved steadily forward to the attack, steadily
but unbelievingly. Unbelief rose to positive
derision, for as we topped a slight brow we gave
a target no artillery could have resisted, yet nothing
happened. ‘It’s a trap,’ said Fowke darkly;
‘he’s luring us on.’ Why should John lie doggo
in this fashion? Nevertheless the airmen insisted
that the Turks were there. So we dug ourselves
in, in a semicircle facing the island, preliminary to
attacking it. It was noon, hot and maddening
with flies. The Leicestershires sent scouts out,
who pushed up to Juber Island, and found that
there were indeed five thousand there—five
thousand sheep and several Arab shepherds. On
the opposite bank John had a machine-gun, with
which he sniped those who approached the water.
He killed mules, and wounded several Dhisties +
and a sweeper. There were also people sniping

1 Indian water-carriers.

HUWESLET 123

with rifles, and the Indian regiments had casualties.
On our side, the cavalry brought in a prisoner.
We had the young gentleman caught at night,
and one other; the 19th Brigade took a fourth
prisoner. So we abandoned the battle, had break-
fast at 2.30 p.m., and returned. The day was
wearying beyond conception, yet the men, British
and Indian alike, were singing as they passed
Al-Ajik. Samarra camp was a swirl of dust after
the day’s busyness; almost a faery place in the
last sunlight.

The next day was dedicated to sleep, and to
humour at the expense of the Koyal Flying Corps,
to whose mess a sheep’s head was voted.

VII
DAUR

Jounny’s leg-pull made him one up. This was
recognized, and his action drew our attention to
the undesirability of allowing him to remain at
Daur. On October 31 the 28th Brigade went
into the trenches at Al-Ajik. November I was
Thursday. Haigh had the misfortune to go very
sick on this day ; he left us, and his successor arrived
about 4 p.m. The new doctor fell into my hands,
as the battalion was unknown to him, and he had
never been in action.

As we went forward bad news came in, so bad
and unexpected that it seemed incredible, the news
of the Italian reverses. This filled us with profound
depression. Our tiny side-show seemed more
insignificant than ever while the European battle
was being lost. When word followed of Allenby’s
success at Beersheba we did not guess that here
was the beginning of a tide of victory which would
ultimately pull the whole war our way. There
was one splinter of light, an absurd joke in London
Opinion which set the Leicestershires chuckling,
‘Overheard at the Zoo.’ It is the conversation
of Cockney children before the ostrich cage:

“Sneagle ! ’

‘Snotaneagle. Snork.’

124

DAUR 125

‘Snotanork. Snowl.’

‘Snotanowl. Snostrich.’

This lent itself to indefinite expansion: ‘ Snemeu,’
“Snalbatross,’ ‘Snoriole,’ ‘ Snelephant.’

Report came of the exploit of Marshall at Corps
Head Quarters. He had gone out in a ‘lamb’?
on the other bank of Tigris, almost to Tekrit, and
had shot down thirty horses and a dozen men as
he flew past the enemy lines.

On the evening of November 1 the Al-Ajik
trenches were crowded. Fritz came over recon-
noitring, and his surprise was amusing to see.
He checked, wheeled, abandoned all thought of a
visit to our camp, and beetled back, after very
elaborate reconnaissance. Then our own planes
flew over, sounding their klaxons and dropping
messages, in rehearsal for the morrow.

At 9.10 the force met at the place of assembly.
The 21st Brigade were to move up the left bank ;
they are hardly in this picture. On the right
bank the 28th Brigade went first, followed by
the roth and 8th Brigades. With the column
were the 4th and oth Brigades, R.F.A., two batteries
of the 56th Brigade, and some 4.5 and 6-inch
howitzers. Altogether, including those operating
on the left bank, we had eighty guns.

The night was even colder than the one before
the Juber Island farce. Part of the night I marched
with my friends of the 53rd Sikhs, with Newitt
and with Heathcote. Every one anticipated a
very hard fight. We were up against a position
which was reputed to be as strong as Istabulat
had been. Before dawn we found ourselves among

1 Light-armoured motor-battery,

126 DAUR

ghostly-looking bushes, and lay down for one
shivering hour. We had marched over seventeen
miles, with the usual exhausting checks and halts
attendant on night-marching, and we were dead-
beat to the wide. Yet nothing could be finer than
the way the men threw weariness away, like a
garment, with the first shells, and went into battle.

Sarcka, the excellent Yank who ran our Y.M.C.A.,
marched with us, carrying a camel-load of cigarettes.
He was usually called ‘Carnegie’ by Dr. Haigh.
That classical mind memorized Sarcka’s name as
meaning ‘ flesh’ ; then, since it moved with equal
ease in Greek and Latin, unconsciously trans-
literated. As we went forward, and a red sun
rose over Tigris, Sarcka remarked : ‘ The sensation
I am about to go through is one which I wouldn’t
miss for worlds.’ Mester Dobson looked surprised.
I bided my time, knowing how unpleasant the first
fifteen minutes under shell-fire are for even the
bravest.

Soon after 6 a.m. the enemy advanced pickets
were driven in. We were advancing in artillery
formation over undulating and broken country,
sparsely set with jujube-bushes (zizyphus). A
gazelle bounded away in front of us. At 6.15,
says my diary, the first shells came. Our planes
swept along, klaxons sounding, and the sky became
torn with shrapnel. Johnny felt for us who formed
the doctor’s retinue, felt with an H.E. bracket,
before and beyond us. The advance was extra-
ordinarily rapid, a race ; consequently the doctor’s
party got the benefit of most of this early shelling.
Fortunately the enemy seemed to have got on to
his old dumps, for his stuff, which came over

DAUR 127

plentifully enough, was detonating badly. A shell
burst in Lyons’s platoon, apparently under Lyons;
yet he walked out of the dust unhurt. The 56th
Rifles went first, advancing as if on parade; this
day they rose high in the Leicestershires’ admira-
tion. The ‘Tigers’ came next; then the 51st and
53rd Sikhs. The enemy was fairly caught by
surprise. Fritz, the previous day, had brought
back the first hint that anything was doing ; and,
despite that knowledge, it was not expected that
march and fight would come so swiftly and together.
If the doctor stopped to bandage a man, we had
to run to keep touch with the regiment. I was
worried with visions of pockets of fifty or sixty
wounded awaiting attention. Very early in the
fight we found two men hit with shrapnel, and
left them in the shell-hole. It was suggested to
Sarcka that he stay with them, and guide the
ambulances along our track whenever they came.
‘No,’ he said sturdily, ‘I’m going on.’ And go
on he did, and was shortly afterwards distributing
cigarettes under heavy fire. Public opinion had
condemned his coming, for the soldier holds that
no man should go under fire unless he has a definite
job there. But when he justified his place by a
score of deeds, from cigarette-distributing to
bandaging the wounded, public opinion rejoiced
and accepted him, known for a comrade and a
brave man.

Along the plain the enemy had a number of
large thorn-stacks, with sand-bagged seats in their
centres. Here had been snipers. These stacks
we avoided ; as we did, as a rule, all such things as
battalion head quarters. The colonel of a regiment

- 128 DAUR

moves with a small army of orderlies ; his majestic
appearance over a brow rarely fails to draw a few
salvoes. The doctor’s meinie, therefore, took their
way along the open, avoiding all prominences
of landscape and people. I turned aside to what
proved to be a 56th Rifles’ aid-post, with a dead
horse before it. Here had been the first Turkish
lines. Our guns pushed on very rapidly, the gunners
riding swiftly by and into a large, deep nulla. We
overpassed them again; there was one smart
minute or so when half a dozen ‘ pipsqueaks’
burst in a narrow fault of the ground, scarcely a
nulla, beside us, the steep sides killing the spread
of the H.E. The enemy had been shrapnelling
hard along the line occupied by the 56th Rifles
and the Leicestershires. Nevertheless we picked
up very few wounded.

Johnny’s shrapnel now began to get wilder
still. We found Colonel Brock, the Leicestershires’
colonel, where several wide, big nullas met. The
battalion was digging in, he said. About thirty
prisoners came over a hill behind us. We set up
an aid-post, our first stationary one; Sarcka pro-
duced a tin of Maconochie, and we had tiffin. A
few wounded Indians came, the first being a man
from whose pocket-book we extracted a shrapnel
bullet. He had no other hurt.

The colonel was puzzled at our few casualties.
There had been not only a good deal of shrapnel,
but heavy rifle and machine-gun fire, yet hardly
a man had been hit. The fight was nearly over,
so I went back for ambulances. John was throwing
a certain amount of explosive stuff about, uselessly
and recklessly. On my way back I found Owen,

DAUR 129

of the 51st Sikhs, with a wounded arm. Owen,
long ago, lost an eye in a bombing accident at
Sannaiyat. He pluckily returned from India,
and again took over the work of bombing instructor
to his regiment.

It was now getting hot, being well past nine
o'clock.

In the trenches by the 56th’s aid-post there were
two Turks, each with a leg smashed to pulp by
H.E. But the most distressing sight was an enemy
sniper on one of the O. Pips already mentioned.
Round him were many used cartridges and bandoliers.
He sat among the thorns, eight feet above ground,
with the impassive mien of a Buddha. His face
had been broken by our shrapnel, and his brains
were running down it; the flies were busy on a
clot of red brain by his temple. He was one mess
of blood, and very heavy as well as high up. My
efforts to lift him down simply stained my clothes.

About 4 p.m. I was with a doctor, looking at a
dead Turk who was a particularly gruesome sight,
with blood still dripping from his nose. Suddenly
appeared a merchant with a camera, who took this
Turk’s photo. Not satisfied with this, he pro-
ceeded to stage-manage the place. The ambulance
was coming up to remove a wounded Turk. He
ordered it back, then bade it run up smartly, while
the man was to be lifted in, equally smartly. Then
he bade the doctor and myself stand behind the
dead Turk aforementioned. When he _ went,
the doctor said, ‘ Thank God, he’s gone.’ I took
the man, in my carelessness, for another doctor
with a taste for horrible pictures, and it was not
till some time after that I realized he was the

I

130 DAUR

official cinematograph operator, and was merely
doing his job. So, somewhere or other, a film has
been exhibited, ‘Wounded being collected on
Mesopotamian battlefields.’

Going back to the Turkish sniper, who was still
on his stack and had been overlooked by the
cinematograph operator, I found that, in his agony,
he had dug a hole in the thorns, and buried his
head; I suppose, to escape the flies. His legs
were waving feebly. It was right he should be
left to the last, as he had no chance of life, and
nothing could be done for him in any way. But
never did I feel more the utter folly and silly cruelty
of war than when I saw this brave man’s misery.
Next morning he was found to have crawled some
hundreds of yards before dying. He had left his
stack.

VIII
AUJEH

Our line was where the plateau rose and then
dropped steeply into deep, narrow fissures. The
night was maddening with cold, and the rum
ration came as a sheer necessity. All through
this brief Tekrit campaign the British troops
were without coats or blankets. The Indian
troops had transport for theirs. The arrange-
ment was correct in theory, since we came from
a chill climate.

None of these later Mesopotamian pushes could
be much more than raids. The rivers in this
latitude were too shallow and shifting for transport,
so we had to be fed and watered by means of Ford
cars. It taxed the whole of the army’s resources
in Fords for Tekrit, blankets and coats having to
give way to rations. Whilst the 7th Division
pushed, the other two fronts were practically
immobilized. Maude could strike on only one
at a time of our three rivers. Ramadie was fought
in September; Tekrit in November; Kifri in
December; and the same round, of Euphrates,
Tigris, and Diyaleh, was followed in 1918.

So we had ten days of what seemed arctic
exposure. This night after Daur, Diggins shared
a Burberry with me; natheless the night

131

132 AUJEH

was one of insane wretchedness. We rejoiced,
with more than Vedic joy, to greet the dawn,
though the flies swiftly made us long for night
again.

On the 3rd we moved slightly forward. My
brigade rested, while the 19th went on. The
enemy’s lines at Aujeh were taken easily. One
wounded Turk was captured. He was set on a
horse, and paraded restlessly back and forward,
for some mystic reason, during the day. Fowke’s
solution was that the authorities hoped the troops
would count him many times over, and been heartened
by the thought that we had destroyed the Turks’
last force in Mesopotamia. When the Aujeh
lines had been taken, our cavalry, supported by
the artillery, tried to rush Tekrit and burn the
stores. This proved impracticable, so we shelled
the dumps at long range. My brigade stood by,
and watched from a high plateau the bursts and
the great smoke-curtains which went up, as once
from burning Sodom. The affair furnished Fowke
with some excellent fooling. He would stand on
a knoll and gnash his teeth, in Old Testament
fashion declaiming, ‘I will neither wash nor shave
till Tekrit has fallen.’ It is unnecessary to say
that the vow was kept, and overkept; and not
by Fowke alone. At other times he was plaintive
and reproachful. We were shelling Tekrit—
Tekrit, the Turkish base, where the Turkish
hospitals were, and ‘the pretty little Turkish nurses.’
‘You chaps don’t think about these things. You're
selfish, and don’t care. I do.’

The desultory fighting of this day was not without
casualties. The 19th Brigade lost fifty-six men

AUJEH 133

up to 2 p.m.; later I heard the figures were fourteen
killed and seventy-three wounded. These were
not in the ‘taking’ of the single line of Aujeh
trenches, but came from long-distance shell-fire.
The cavalry, too, lost men. The enemy slipped
out on our coming, but their guns had the line
beautifully registered. In the evening the 28th
Brigade covered the cavalry’s return. We had
our own work as well. Fourteen shell-ammunition
dumps fell into our hands by the enemy’s retreat
from Daur. These we collected, and quantities
of shell-cases and wood. The Turkish gunners
had most elaborate and comfortably-made dug-
outs, finely timbered. These were dismantled
and fired. We marched in, with the hills
ablaze about us, and the darkness warm and
bright.

The 4th was Sunday. Fritz appeared about
6.30 a.m., and bombed us, coming very low indeed.
Mesopotamia being a side-show for us, the enemy
usually had at least one machine better than any
of ours. This Sabbath Fritz spent in fetching
bombs and distributing them. Twice he bombed
the Leicestershires in the Turks’ old trenches,
but hit no one. So he paid no more attention
to the infantry, but looked up the artillery, and
the wagon-lines, and the transport. Here he
did a deal of damage, and we soon had horses
careering madly about the place. Reports came
that the Turks were advancing. So, though no
one dreamed that they would make a serious
attack, we consolidated the last lines of the Daur
position against them.

My diary notes: ‘Rum ration. Flies.’ For

134 AUJEH

such elemental things had existence become
memorable.

The day was cheered by news of the Gaza
successes, as the previous day had been by that
of Beersheba.

Fritz occupied his afternoon and evening in the
same disreputable fashion. At nightfall our
authorities were debating whether to go on to
Tekrit or fall back to Samarra. Diggins, the
fire-eater, hoped earnestly for the former course,
and laid confident bets that it would be. Our
brigadier, when I ran across him, deplored that
in April we had stopped at Samarra, though he
had urged our going on to Tekrit (or anywhere
else where there were Turks).

Orders came. We were to fall back two miles,
then sweep westward, and on to Tekrit. Fowke
reiterated his engagement not to shave or wash
till Tekrit had fallen ; and we burned, with reluctant
glee, the excellent wood that Johnny Turk had
collected against our coming to Daur. Now in
Mesopotamia wood is far, far more precious than
rubies. But this wood had to be burned, since
we were not coming back. So vast and glorious
fires sprang up. And each hero, in his turn lifting
a long beam, like a phalarica, hurled it at the
blaze. The assembled Trojans cheered, with
admiration or derision, according as each shot
fell accurately or short. In this wise, then, did
Sunday evening pass with the 17th Foot.

IX
TEKRIF

WE moved off, footsore. Mention of the cold
must have become monotonous. But this night’s
cold touched a sharper nerve of agony than any
before. Our ‘rest’ came, by a refinement of
cruelty, not immediately before dawn, but between
2.30 and 4.30a.m. We were then on bleak uplands,
swept by arctic winds. In Baghdad winter is a
time of frost ; and we were far north of Baghdad.
No men lay down ; very few even stood still. The
majority used the two hours of ‘rest’ in running
to and fro, and it was with immense thankfulness
that we took up our trudge once more.

This time there was no question of surprise.
Morning found us on a vast plain, set with yellow-
berried jujube-bushes and low scrub. Shortly
after 6 a.m. the enemy began shelling our trans-
port, which accordingly moved out of range. My
brigade fell slightly back, in conformity. Captain
McIntyre, in a gloomy mood perhaps due to the
freezing night just finished, prophesied that we
should get the ‘heavy stuff’ and the ‘ overs’
when once the enemy gunners got their nefarious
game fairly going. Everything was bustle.
Signallers set up their posts, Head Quarters were
established, caterpillars crawled up with their

135

136 TEKRIT

heavy guns. Lieutenant-General Cobbe, the First
Corps commander, was controlling operations.
Fritz also seemed interested. He came over
twice, very low and very hurriedly, but did no
bombing. His second visit was followed by half
a dozen crumps, from the 5.9’s, for our 6-inch
guns.

This whole campaign had come very suddenly.
Corps, I was told, were ignorant up to almost the
day of our starting out from Samarra. Staff-
captains and quartermasters received orders at
the eleventh hour for transport arrangements.
The campaign was a tour de force, everything
being sacrificed to rations and water. A stream
of Fords ran night and day between the troops and
Samarra.

My brigade had a day of inaction, being moved
up from time to time, and momentarily expecting
to be sent in. The 21st Brigade had moved up
the left bank, meeting with no opposition. Their
part was enfilade gunfire. Our old colleagues,
the 8th Brigade (from the 3rd Lahore Division),
and the roth Brigade attacked. The battle was
largely one of gunfire. For such an exhibition
Guy Fawkes’ Day had been fitly chosen.

Tekrit was one of the Turk’s best battles in the
class of which he is such a master, the rearguard
action. Our airmen reported that, from our
arrival, his troops and transport were flowing away
steadily. His lines were held by artillery and
machine-guns, fearlessly worked to the last minute
of safety. Our cavalry operated on the left. It
was here the action broke down. At this point
there was only one line of trenches against us,

TERRIT 137

and many think the 28th Brigade should have been
sent in. Had this been done, the enemy right
would have been forced back, and his troops pinned
to the river, with large captures of men and guns
as result. But the 28th Brigade were kept out,
because of a cavalry mistake. The latter’s orders
were to drop one brigade on the flank, and then
push through to the river, behind the enemy.
Then the 28th Brigade were to go in, and, when
they had cleared the Turks out of their entrench-
ments, the cavalry were to collect the prisoners.
But, instead, the cavalry, after dropping a brigade
to watch the flank, waited, and finaliy did a very
gallant but useless charge.

The terrain was extremely difficult. | Almost
the first thing the assaulting forces had to do was
to cross a nulla sixty feet deep and a quarter of
a mile wide, commanded by machine-guns, and
searched with shrapnel. Later, when my own
brigade moved up in support, we crossed this
nulla. The toilsome going over slipping shingle
was like Satan’s painful steps on the burning marl,

not like those steps
On Heaven’s azure, and the torrid clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire.

The story of this day belongs to the 8th and roth
Brigades. My own were spectators only; deeply
interested, and our own fate might at any moment
become involved, but harassed with heat and
flies and the unspeakable boredom born of
long warfare, which even a battle can disperse
only in part. Stories filtered through of the heroic
work of the Seaforths and Manchesters and of the

138 'TRERTY

47th and 59th Sikhs. Report persisted that the
Seaforths’ head quarters had been knocked out
by a direct hit, with twelve casualties, and that
their regimenta] sergeant-major (Sutherland) was
killed. This rumour was partly true, but a little
exaggerated. Their colonel (Reginald Schomberg)
was wounded, and their adjutant (McRae). This
was the McRae who had fought the Turks with
his naked fists at Sheikh Saad in January, 1916,
and who rose from sergeant-major to Lieutenant-
Colonel, with D.S.O. and Bar. Sutherland was
not killed, but wounded. Lee, the Seaforths’
padre, kept up the tradition set by Dr. Ewing,
that ‘unsubduable old Roman’ whose white
locks had waved through so many battles, till he
was wounded at the forcing of Baghdad. Burn,
the one Seaforths’ officer killed, out of twelve hit,
was struck close behind Lee. Milne and Baldry
were killed among the Manchesters’ officers.

From 10.30 to II a.m. was a time of artillery
preparation. Fritz drifted restlessly about; our
own planes were busy ; klaxons sounded ; messages
were dropped. According to information, opposite
us the Turkish 51st and 52nd Divisions were
unsupported. Both were old foes of Sannaiyat
days. By 11.30 the enemy’s first two lines were
taken by direct assault. At 3 p.m. my own brigade
moved two miles closer in, on the left. It was a
costly business, pushing the enemy back by frontal
attack just where he was strongest in every way.
Long lines of our wounded passed us, with a few
Turkish prisoners. The day was as intolerably
hot as the night had been cold. By four o’clock
the Turk had got most of his heavier guns back.

TEKRIT 139

We were shelling a small mosque, which he was
using as an O.P. The 6-inches registered a hit,
which sent up a white cloud of dust and powder.
Every one was hopeful. The cavalry and ‘lambs’
were said to be right round the enemy’s flank, and
some thousands of prisoners were regarded as
certain. Captain Henderson, the Diggins of the
Manchesters, was rumoured to have taken three
guns. At 4.30 the 21st Brigade launched an
effective enfilade on the enemy’s transport from
across the river; the two attacking brigades went
in again; the cavalry charged across the Turks’
right trenches. We of the 28th could watch it
all with the naked eye, the one confusion being
sometimes as to whether it was Turks scurrying
away or Seaforths going in. But we saw the
Seaforths’ magnificent charge. Unfortunately
most of the crumps which we took to be among
a Turkish counter-attack were among our own
men, who at one time ran into their own barrage.
Their line swept forward, irresistible as always.
In later days, in Palestine, when a despatch praised
various miscellaneous troops who had been in
their first actions and done not too badly, some
one was foolish enough to express surprise that
the Seaforths were not mentioned by name. ‘I
should consider it an insult,’ said their colonel,
‘if any one thought it worth mentioning that my
regiment had done what they were told to do.
We take some things for granted.’ At Tekrit
Schomberg, though already wounded, led his men
in person. He was scholar and Christian; ‘the
bravest of the brave,’ yet a lover of all fair
things.

140 TEKRIT

As the Turks ran from their trenches our machine-
guns cut them up. Rumour now grew positive
that we had the enemy hemmed against the river.
Evening closed witha deal of desultory gunfire, which
continued spasmodically all night. My brigade
went to rest, in anticipation of a renewal of battle
next dawn, when our turn would be due. The
ambulances had worked nobly all day, cars sweep-
ing up to well within shell-range; and all night
long stretcher-bearer parties were busy. Their
work was superintended by Captain Godson, whose
M.C. was well earned.

Tekrit cost us about two thousand casualties.
Many of the wounded collected in the 19 C.C.S.*
at Samarra had been wounded by aeroplane bombs.

Next morning our orders of the previous night
were confirmed. The enemy were supposed to
be holding the ‘ kilns’ (actually these were tombs)
behind Tekrit. The 28th Brigade were to go
through the 8th and i1o9th Brigades, and drive
them out. We were very doubtful of their being
there. However, we went forward in the usual
artillery formation. Every house in Tekrit had
a white flag. This was the place where Townshend’s
men were spat on as they limped through it, prisoners.
Nevertheless there was the same surprising dis-
play of fairly clean linen to which the villages
before Baghdad had treated us eight months
previously, and the Arabs were most anxious for
us to realize how extremely friendly their sentiments
were.

We went forward, but found the Turks had
gone. There were crump-holes everywhere; the

1 Casualty clearing-station.

TEKRIT 141

amount of our shrapnel lying about, wasted,
would have broken a Chancellor of the Exchequer’s
heart. Parts of the spaces between the Turkish
successive lines were just contiguous craters. But
there had been disappointingly few direct hits on
trenches. The cemetery, hard by, possessed one
or two craters also. The enemy had left abundant
live shells, shell-cases, cartridge-cases. But there
were very few dead. I saw only two; and a few
places where the parapet had been pulled in for
a hasty burial. The old question was raised, Did
the Turk dig graves beforehand, against an action,
to hide his losses? If he did, one can imagine
few more effective ways of putting heart into his
troops than by detailing them for such a job. I
heard that the Seaforths buried sixty Turks. But
their losses were certainly far less than ours. We
took a hundred and fifty-seven prisoners. Corps
claimed that evidence collected after the battle
showed that the enemy losses for the three actions
of Daur, Aujeh, Tekrit, were at least fifteen hundred.
The Infantry, who had not access to Corps’ means
of information, assessed them much lower. Myself,
I think eight hundred would be nearer the mark.
There were great heaps of cartridge-cases, at
intervals of fifty yards, along the trenches, where
machine-gunners had clearly been. The spaces
between showed little sign of having been held.
From the Turk’s point of view, Tekrit was as
satisfactory a battle almost as, from our point of
view, it was unsatisfactory. His gunners and
machine-gunners fought with very great skill
and coolness, withdrawing late and rapidly ; hence
the great dumps of shell-ammunition which were

142 TEKRIT

our only booty. We should have got the whole
force. But no sufficient barrage was kept up on
the lines of retreat during the night ; the cavalry’s
service, though gallant, was ineffective; the 28th
Brigade were not used at the one point where
they might have done the enemy much harm ;
and Head Quarters were too far back. The Turks
got every gun and machine-gun away. We
captured a hundred boxes of field-gun ammunition,
four hundred rifles, five thousand wooden beams,
gun-limbers, boats, bridging material, buoys, two
aeroplanes (one utterly broken up by the enemy,
the other repairable), and a box of propellers, all
serviceable. The enemy blew up three ammunition
dumps before retreating.

Fowke had dragged through the campaign with
a crocked knee. He now went into hospital.
There J. Y., who always anxiously haunted all
battle-purlieus, fearing for the regiment he loved
so well, found him; and, since he was not ill, obtained
permission to feed him with some of the battalion’s
Christmas pudding, just arrived. He refreshed
him, too, with Kirin beer. Thus J. Y.’s last glimpse
of him—for Fowke did not return to the battalion
—was a happy one.

These days were very wretched. Turkish camps
are unbelievably filthy ; and flies swarmed on the
battlefield. We salvaged some miles up beyond
Tekrit, with the results already stated. One of
the two captured planes was a recovered one of
our own, with the enemy black painted over our
sign. We had a lot of very enjoyable destruction,
including that of the musketry school and barracks,
four miles away.

TEKRIT 143

Tekrit’s chief fame is that Saladin was born
just outside it. But it was also an early Christian
centre ; the town wall is said to be partly the old
monastery wall. The town is built on cliffs, which
tower very steeply above the Tigris. The
inhabitants were keen on trade, taking anything
‘not too hot or too heavy’; but were unpleasant
and exorbitant beyond any Arabs, even of
Mesopotamia.

We now held both the Tigris and the Euphrates
ends of the caravan route to Hit. G.A. opined
that we should drive the enemy in from both
ends, till both British forces were shelling each
other. However, the Turk ran some seventy
miles farther; and our planes did great bombing
raids on their camp in the Jebel Hamrin, having
the joy of using some of the enemy’s own bombs.

On the 8th I got a lift back to Samarra on a
Ford, for the purpose of sending up food and com-
forts to the battalion. This kindly purpose was
never fulfilled. I went sick, but had more sense than
to go to hospital this time ; and the troops returned
from Tekrit. The Leicestershires on route put
up a large hyena, but failed to run him down.
My premature return became a famous taunt.
“He deserted,’ Diggins would say when foiled
in fair argument ; ‘ deserted from Tekrit, deserted
in face of the enemy.’

The troops were back at Samarra by the 13th.
‘Ah!’ Busra surmised, ‘they’ve had a bad knock.
“Withdrawn on account of difficulty of com-
munications.”” We know that story.’ It was
as after the April fighting, when the wildest
distortions were believed down the line, and when

144 TEKRIT

I was asked in confidence by an officer formerly
with the Leicestershires if it was true that his old
regiment had lost eighteen of our own guns.

Nearly every one was seedy for a while, with
chills on the stomach and sore feet ; and a great
wave of depression passed over the division. We
would have made any effort to hold Tekrit after
our toil and losses. But the Fords were needed
for another front. So Johnny, after a time, was
able to creep cautiously back, to the extent of
cavalry patrols at Daur and Tekrit.

x
DOWN TO BUSRA

EVENTS moved rapidly for the division. The
brigades scattered down the line, and H.Q. went to
Akab, near the supposed site of Opis. The 21st
Brigade went across the river. Only the Leicester-
shires remained at Samarra, and even they sent one
company to Istabulat. Our other three companies
went to the station. The 3rd Division took over
Istabulat and Samarra. The conviction took root
that we were leaving the country.

On the rgth General Maude’s death was told. A
pack of rumours came as to how he had come to die,
and as to how many others had died. His funeral
took place in Baghdad ; Fritz attended and dropped
a message of sympathy. Mistaking his purpose
when he flew so low, the archies fired on him. Also,
for once, they are said to have nearly hit him.

Knowledge of the magnitude of the Italian
reverses filtered in. Our Baghdad Anzac wireless
heard ‘ one hundred thousand prisoners,’ when the
German wireless broke in, ‘ Hallo, hallo, hallo,
Baghdad! We can tell you later news. It is three
hundred thousand prisoners, two thousand five
hundred guns.’ The enemy wireless possessed the
code-name of our own, and frequently broke in on

145 K

146 DOWN TO BUSRA

our messages with information, asking us to acknow-
ledge ; but this was forbidden.

In December’s first week the Kifri push took place.
This was not the 7th Division’s affair. The Third
Corps had it in charge. We rationed them, which
meant thirty-five miles of communications, up the
left bank of the Tigris, into the sub-hills of the
Persian borderlands. The zoth Punjabis furnished
dump-guards. These days I spent, exceedingly
pleasantly, with the Guides in the Adhaim Valley.
Here was a scene of exquisite loveliness. The
Adhaim was dry; but, in its deep bed, green lines
showed where the water ran. The winter floods
were even then beginning to gather higher up, and
had reached to within a dozen miles of the brook’s
junction with Tigris. The valley was thick jungle.
There were no trees, but a most dense and luxuriant
growth of tamarisk, populus euphratica, zizyphs and
other thorns, forming a covert six to fourteen feet
high. Liquorice grew freely. Wild pig abounded,
hares, black partridge, and szsz. In my very brief
stay I saw no pig; but their signs were everywhere,
and their water-holes in the river-bed bore marks
of constant resort. The Adhaim was crossed by
Nebuchadnezzar’s great Nahrwan Canal. This was
now, in effect, a deep nulla, and had silted in, so that
its bottom was above the Adhaim bank. Its cliffs
were tenanted with blue rock-pigeon, with hedge-
hogs and porcupines. Shoals of mackerel-like fish
used to swim up the Tigris, with fins skimming the
surface. Erskine showed me how to shoot these;
as, in later days, when we were in the Palestine line
at Arsuf, I have seen Diggins stunning fish with
rifle-shots in the old Roman harbour.

DOWN TO BUSRA 147

In their Samarra digging the Guides had found a
stone statue, which is what they asked me up to
see. The head and arms had been broken off, ob-
viously deliberately; but it was plainly the Goddess
Ishtar, with breasts remaining. She was sitting
before the mess-tent, like Demeter before the House
of Triptolemus. This discovery was of interest
beyond itself. The books place Opis near Akab,
apparently because the Adhaim enters the Tigris
opposite Akab. But, as I have said already,
Kenneth Mason has accumulated good reasons
for placing Opis near Samarra. With those
reasons, this statue of Ishtar may take its
place. The Samarra of history was not much more
than a standing camp for caliphs in refuge from their
true capital, Baghdad. But old Samarra covers
nearly twenty square miles of ruins upon ruins.
Opis was a great mart ; and Samarra, in the relics
of Eski Baghdad, to the north, reaches almost to the
Tigris end of the Tekrit-Hit caravan road.

The Kifri push resulted in another withdrawal
of the fight-weary John. He set Kifri coal-mine
on fire, and it burned for some days. We took a
hundred and fifty prisoners and two field-guns.
Though Russia was out of the war, a local force of
Russians helped us. They were told they would find
their rations in a certain place when they took it.
They took it all right.

I left the Guides, and went back to Beled, to my
good friends of the 56th Brigade, R.F.A. On
December 6 the r9th Infantry and the 56th Artillery
Brigades received orders to move down-stream
immediately. All came suddenly; I was awakened
by the striking of tents, On the 8th the Leicester-

148 DOWN TO BUSRA

shires left Samarra. In less than six days they were
in Baghdad. In those six days of marching they
suffered terribly from cold, rain, and footsoreness.
But they swung through Baghdad singing. The
men of the Anzac wireless bought up oranges, and
threw them to our fellows as they passed out of
Baghdad to their camp at Hinaidi, two miles below.
Baghdad streets were frozen every Morning; a
bucket of water, put out overnight, would be almost
solid next day. Nevertheless there were enough
flies to be an intolerable pest. When we passed the
variously spelt station of Mushaidiyeh, Keely noted
the script preferred by the railway, Mouchahadie,
and observed, ‘ Evidently it was connected in their
mind with flies ; no doubt with good reason.’

Baghdad in winter is given up to immense flocks
of crows and starlingsand tothe ‘ Baghdad canary.’?
No wild flowers were out, except a white alisma.
We purchased ‘ goodly Babylonish garments,’ the
abbas for which the town isfamous. Mine were sent
home in an oil-sheet. The oil-sheet arrived, the
postal-service satisfying themselves with looting
the abbas. After all, men who have the monotony
of service at the Base are entitled to indemnify
themselves for the trouble to which men up the line
put them.

We got our last glimpse of Fritz on the 15th. He
was over Baghdad, and was said to have dropped a
message, ‘ Good-bye, 7th Division.’ The country-
side was stiff with troops moving up and down.

Our destination was matter of constant specula-
tion. When orders to leave Beled reached the rgth
Brigade, there came a wire from Divisional Head

1 The domestic_ass.

DOWN TO BUSRA 149

Quarters, ‘ Tell the padre to preach from Matthew
twenty, verse eighteen.’ But the 28th Brigade
knew nothing of this hint to Lee. Some thought we
were going to Ahwaz, and thence up to Persia ;
others held this Persian theory with a modification,
that we should arrive up-country from Bushire.
The favourite notion was that we were going to do
another Gallipoli landing, behind Alexandretta.
Some one got hold of a map, and announced that
there were mountains there nine thousand feet
high.

On the 18th we embarked, and began our slow
drift down the flooded, racing stream. We passed
the old landmarks, so known and so remembered.
On the 20th we passed Kut, and knew that for most
of us it was our farewell glimpse of the town that
through so many dreadful months had seemed a
place of faery, and inaccessible.

Red Autumn on the banks,

Where, thorough fields that bear no grain,

A desolate Mother treads,

By the brimming river, torn with rain!

A chill wind moves in the faded ranks

Of the rushes, rumpling their russet heads.
And out of the mist, on the racing stream
As I drift, I know that there gathers fast,
Over the lands I shall see no more,

Another mist, which with life shall last,

Till all that I watched and my comrades bore
Will be autumn mist, in an old man’s dream.

Here an Empire’s might had agonized ; and many of
us had buried more hopes than we shall cherishagain.

It rained, and kept on raining. Knowing what
wretchedness this meant on shore, we were glad of
the crowded shelter of our P-boat, maugre its noises

150 DOWN TO BUSRA

and discomforts. Marshall, the semi-mythical per-
son at Corps, who had visited the Turks at Tekrit,
scattering ruin from a ‘lamb,’ was everywhere said
to be taking bets, ten to one, that the war would be
ended by Christmas. If rumour spoke truth,
Marshall must have lost a pile of money.

On the 22nd we entrained at Amara, reaching
Busra late on the 23rd. We spent Christmas
encamped on a marsh. My mare developed un-
suspected gifts as a humorist. Every time she saw
a tree, even a date-palm, she shied, cavorted, and
leapt, showing the utmost amazement and terror.
This was witty at first, but she kept it up too long.
Busra backwaters were lovelier than ever, with the
willows in their winter dress, gold-streaked, and the
brooding blue kingfishers above the waveless
channels. Bablast were in yellow button, scenting
the ditches where huge tortoises crawled and clus-
tered. On the 30th I got a glimpse of Shaiba, of the
tall feathery tamarisks above the Norfolks’ graves
and trenches. On January 2 we embarked on the
Bandra. With the cheering as we moved away, the
words of a Mesopotamian ‘ gafi’* recurred tomemory :

And when we came to Ashar,* we only cheered once;
And I don’t suppose we shall cheer again, for months, and
months, and months.

We drifted down the beautiful waterway, past its
forest of palms and its abundant willows and wav-
ing reeds. Wereached Koweit Bay on the 4th and
waited for rations and our new boats. On the7th we
wereon our way to a new campaign. Inninemonths

2 Mimosa. 2 Concert party.
* At Busra; the place of disembarkation.

DOWN TO BUSRA 151

the Leicestershires were swinging through Beirut in
the old, immemorial fashion, though foot-weary, and
singing, whilst the people madly cheered and shouted.
But it was not the old crowd. Fowke, Warren,
Burrows—these three were gathered, two months
after the battalion left Mesopotamia, at Kantara,
when the German last offensive burst. They were
sent at once to France. Fowke and Warren were
badly wounded ; a letter from Fowke informed me
that he was hit ‘while running away,’ a jesting
statement which one understands. Burrows, one
of our keenest minds and a delightful man, a valued
friend, did extraordinarily well—he was strangely
fearless—but was killed as the French war was end-
ing. From the rgth Brigade Haughton, Thornhill,
General Peebles, had all gone long ago. Haughton
was wounded in the Afghan War, and Thornhill died
of illness. And now, as I write, G.A. is off to
South America again, and J. Y. to Canada.

I and my friends have seen our friends no more.

INDEX

Apams, Captain, 80, 84
Adhaim, Shat-el, 54,
146, 147
Ahwaz, 15
Akab, 145, 147
Al-Ajik, 80, 104, 108, Iog,
124, 125
Ali Gharbi, 16
Amara, 15, 150
Anzac Wireless, 145, 148
Arabs, 26, 43 seq., 96, I00,
T7022. LAO; (T43
Aujeh, 131 seq.
» (Palestine), 27

106,

BABI, 22
Baghdad, 7) 9, 18 seq., 54,
107, 148

Baldry, Sec.-Lieut., 138

Bale, Sec.-Lieut., 114

Barrett, Major, 37, 91

Barron, Sec.-Lieut., 111

Batten, Sergeant, 46

Beit Aiessa, 17, 116

» Na’ama, 112

iBeled, 2niseq., 48, 49, 1r2,
UNG aii

Beirut, 151

Bhopals (9th), 64, 65, 118

Black Watch (2nd), 8, 9, 65,
70

Blewitt, Captain, 84

153

Bracken, Captain, 108

British Field Ambulance (7),
67

Brock, Lieut.-Col., 128

Brodie, Lieut., 60

Brooking, Maj.-Gen., 118

Buddus. See ARABS

Burn, Sec.-Lieut., 138

Burrows, Sec.-Lieut., 151

Busra, 112, 115, 143, 150

CAILLEY’s Column, 54

Candler, Edmund, 7, 9

Carmel, 27

Casualty Clearing Station
(t9), 140

Cavalry, 18, 22, 30, 36, 39,
GOW OL, =1oOZzs e232) 1335
137, 142

Clifton, Private, 93

Cobbe, Lieut.-Gen., 136

Connaught Rangers, 110

Copeman, Sec.-Lieut. Charles,
32, 44, 57, 58, 60, 8o,
Il4

Copeman, Sec.-Lieut. J. Y.,
60, 61, 63, 69, IOI, 142,
I51

Cotter, Colonel, 66

Creagh, Captain, 31, 87

Ctesiphon, 16, 117

Culverwell, Captain, 38

154

DAUR, 120, 124 seq., 133, 144

Davies, Brig.-Gen., 22, 38,
107

Delamaine, Brig.-Gen., 15

Diggins, Captain, 10, 86 seq.,
Tol, 131, 134, 139, 143,
146

Dobson, Private, 32 seq., 79,
84, 85, 92, 94, 96, 126

Dujail Canal, 44, 45, 51, 62,
FAs fie ero)

Dujaileh, 16, 116

ERSKINE, Captain, 146
Ewing, Rev. Dr., 138
Ezra’s Tomb, 113

Fane, Maj.-Gen., 113

Fao, 15

Farrell, Father, 97

Felahiyeh, 17

Fergusson, Sec.-Lieut., 113

Fisher, Sec.-Lieut., 44

Fowke, Sec.-Lieut., 31 seq.,
42, 48, 52, 54 seq., 60
Seq-;, 09, 74). LOL, to2.
113, 120 seq., 132, 142,
151

GurRKHAS (1/8th), 65, 69, 70,
90

Godson, Captain, 140

Graham, Captain, V.C., 84,
go

Grant-Anderson, Sec.-Lieut.,
35, 54, 55, 69, 81 seq.,
86, I14, 120, 143, I51

Grattan, Lieut.-Col., 84

Griffiths, Lieut.-Col., 103

Guides (Ist), 65, 118, 146, 147

INDEX

Haicu, Captain, I1I, 124,
126

Hall, Sec.-Lieut., 44, 53, 54,
81, 83

Harbe, 28, 43, 48 seq.

Harley, Major, 49

Hart, Sec.-Lieut., 66

Hasted, Captain, 10, 35, 36,
44, 71, 82, 85 seq., 102

Haughton, Captain, 97, 151

Hayes, Sergeant, 34

Heathcote, Captain, 125

Hebden, Sec.-Lieut., 53

Henderson, Captain, 139

Highland Light Infantry,
116

Hinaidi, 148

Hunter, Captain, 103

Huweslet, 120 seq.

INTELLIGENCE Summaries,
117 seq.

Irvine, Captain, 65

Ishtar, 147

Istabulat, 48, 54, 57 seq.

Italian Reverses, 124, 145

JEBEL Hamrin, 19, 21, (63%
143

Kazim Karabekir Bey, 62

Keely, Sec.-Lieut., 53, 113,
I17, 148

Kifri, 131, 146, 147

Knatchbull, Lieut.-Col., 29
33, 35, 66, 87, 112

Knott, Rev. A. E., 67

Koweit, 150

Kut-el-Amara, 15 seq., 54,
II5 seq., 149

’

INDEX

Lancers (32nd). See Cav-
ALRY

Lang, Captain, 117

» sergeant, 98

Lawrence, Sergeant, 34

Mee Rev. ik, v2. 138) T49

Leslie, Lieut.-Col., 49

Light Armoured Motor Bat-
teries, 125, 139

Lone-Tree Village, 16

Lowther, Captain, 89, 97, ror

Lyons, Sec.-Lieut., 127

MACHINE-GUNNERS, 22
65, 121

Mackenzie, Captain, 65

McInerney, Sec.-Lieut., 57
seq., 83, 87 seq.

McIntyre, Captain, 135

McKay, Lieut., 84

McLeod, Major, 28, 38 seq.,
95

McLeod, Sec.-Lieut., 67 seq.

McRae, Major, 138

Manchesters, 117, 137 seq.

Marner, Lieut., 35, 38, 45
seq.

Marshall’s Column, 85

Marshall, Captain, 125, 150

Mason, Sec.-Lieut., 113

» Captain Kenneth, ro,

26; T05, 115, 147

Maude, General, 18, 46, 63,
III, 118, 145

Median Wall, 56, 59 seq.

Ae eS Second, 75 seq.
Milne, Sec.-Lieut., 138
Mosul, 19, 113, 118
Mushaidiyeh, 19, 21, 27, 28,

148

ert

55

Nacpur, Bishop of, 51, 108
Nahrwan Canal, 146
Nasiriyeh, 15

Newitt, Captain, 38, 125
Norfolks, 150

Opis, 105, 145, 147
Otter, Sec.-Lieut., 35
Owen, Sec.-Lieut., 128, 129

PEEBLES, Brig.-Gen., 51, 76,
97, IOI, 107, 151
Punjabis, 90, 146

Q’URNA, 15

RAMADIE, 20, II0, 118, 131

Reid, Major, 61

Rifles (56th), 22, 31, 39, 79,
84 seq.

Royal Field Artillery, 22, 30,
63, 77, 85, 128, 139, 147

Royal Flying Corps, 123

Russians, 16, 17, 22, 147

SAMARRA, 8, 9, Ig, 22, 70Seq.,
113, 117, 123, 143, 145,
147

Saladin, 143

Sanderson, Captain, 34

Sannaiyat, 17, 18, 28, 63, 64,
65, 109, III, 114 seq.,
138

Sarcka, 126 seq.

Scarth, Lieut., 84, 94

Schomberg, Lieut.-Col., 138,
139

Seaforths (Ist), 8, 61 seq., 90,
137 seq.

Service, Lieut., 32, 33, 36, 83

156

Shaiba, 15, 150

Shefket Pasha, 62

Sheikh Saad, 16, 116, 138}

Shumran, 18, 116 seq.

Sikhs (51st and 53rd), 22, 31
seq., 71 seq., 125 seq.

Sikhs (47th and 59th), 138

Sindiyeh, 22, 78

Singh, Subahdar Aryan, 89

Sinijah, 54

Sittake, 26

Sowter, Lieut., 53, 58, 97,
102

Stewart, Lieut., 66

Stones, Captain, 39

Suffolk, Major the Earl of,
65, 67

Sumaikchah, 22 seq., 37, 45,
57, 80, IIT

Sutherland, Sergeant-Major,
138

TEKRIT, 10, 20, 132 seq.

Tennant, Major, 22

Thomson, Brig.-Gen., 93

Thornhill, Captain, 97, 107
seq., I5I

INDEX

Thorpe, Lieut., 66, 87 seq.,
102, 107 seq., I14

Tivey, Sergeant, 89, 96!

Townshend, Maj.-Gen., 15
seq., 140

Townshend’s Regatta, 15

Twin Canals, 112

UmmM-EL-HANNA, 16 seq.

WADI, 16, 83

Waller, Lieut., 94

Warren, Sec.-Lieut., 68, 81,
II4, 151

Wauchope, Brig.-Gen., 8, 62

Weir, Captain, 99 seq., 107

Westlake, Sec.-Lieut., 23, 30,
46, 48 seq., 53, 75, 80,
92, 97, 114

Whatsize, Sergeant-Major,
69, 88

Whitehead, Sergeant, 32, 84

Willcocks, Sir William, 50

Williamson, Corporal, 87

Wilson, Captain, 32 seq., 78
seq., III

XENOPHON, 26 seq., 59, 78

,

Printed by the Southampton Times Company, Ltd., 70 Above Bar,

Wa aeRO
fn)

ae